What New Testament critic Bart Ehrman categorizes as one of his “favorite apparent discrepancies” in the Bible would be relatively easy for him to resolve were he not hopelessly lost in a wooden literal labyrinth of his own making. In his book, Jesus Interrupted, he cites the problem as follows:

In John 13:36, Peter says to Jesus, “Lord where are you going?” A few verses later Thomas says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going” (John 14:5). And then, a few minutes later, at the same meal, Jesus upbraids his disciples, saying, “Now I am going to the one who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’” (John 16:5).

That leaves only two possibilities according to Ehrman: “Either Jesus had a very short attention span or there is something strange going on with the sources for these chapters.”¹

First, it is instructive to note that were I to take Bart in the woodenly literal sense that he takes the Bible, I would be doing him a grave injustice. As such, it would hardly be fair to suppose that he really thinks it possible that “Jesus had a very short attention span.” Anyone who reads his book in context knows full well that Ehrman is convinced that John-who he characterizes as a “lower-class, illiterate, Aramaic-speaking peasant”²-did not write the gospel attributed to him and that the sources that were cobbled together to create the text were decidedly unreliable.

Furthermore, we must be careful not to fall for historical revisionists who, like Ehrman, would have us believe on the basis of Acts 4:13 that John was illiterate and therefore could not have written the fourth gospel. John may have been “unlettered” in the sense that he was not educated beyond the primary schooling available to boys at that time, but he was clearly not illiterate. Not only is it an uncharitable stretch to demean John as illiterate from the standpoint of his formal education, but this characterization neglects the immediate and overall context of the Book of Acts, where the “unlearned” apostles continually astonished the Jewish teachers of the Law with their knowledge and wisdom in much the same way as Jesus himself had-though He, too, was without the prerequisite rabbinic training demanded by Ehrman. Moreover, following the resurrection of the Master Teacher, there is every indication that the apostles devoted themselves to the study and ministry of the Word of God.³ An entire adult lifetime of such study can easily account for John’s ability to produce an astonishingly sophisticated and subtly nuanced literary masterpiece.

Finally, allow me to underscore what is painfully obvious to anyone who engages Bart’s so-called “problems with the Bible.”⁴ Professor Ehrman, it seems, is wholly incapable of comprehending the subtlety of sophisticated literary nuances. Instead, he is bent on forcing the text through a fundamentalist filter. Peter and Jesus obviously utter the words, “where are you going?” with decidedly different drifts. As the venerable New Testament scholar R. C. H. Lenski has well said, “Peter’s question in 13:36 was…only a selfish exclamation which would not hear of Jesus’ going away alone. And the assertion of Thomas in 14:5 was nothing but an expression of discouragement and dullness of mind….So here Jesus is leaving, his going to his Sender means so much to the disciples, and yet none of them requests one word of this precious information.”⁵ Put another way, while the disciples focused on mean earthly vanities, Christ intended to elevate their gaze to eternal verities.

Was Jesus a dummy with a painfully short attention span, as per Professor Ehrman? Or is Professor Ehrman hopelessly lost in a wooden literal labyrinth of his own making? You be the judge.

-Hank Hanegraaff

Hank Hanegraaff is president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast heard daily throughout the United States and Canada. For a list of stations airing the Bible Answer Man, or to listen online, log on to Equip.org.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

NOTES

1. Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know about Them) (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 9.

2. Ibid., 106.

3. See Acts 6:2-4.

4. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, 6.

5. R.C.H. Lenski, Commentary on the New Testament: The Interpretation of St. John’s Gospel (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2001 [originally published 1943]), 1078-79.

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.

——————————————————————————–

[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.

After reading the synoptic gospels, Ehrman was unable to figure out whether the women saw a man, as Mark says (Mark 16:5), or two men as Luke says (Luke 24:4), or an angel as Matthew says (Matt. 28:2).^[1] I’m left to wonder why one of professor Ehrman’s students didn’t pause for a brief moment to unpack the mystery for him because as Professor Ehrman himself has figured out, wherever there are two angels there is also one angel^[2], always, always, always, without exception. The fact that Mark only references the angel who addressed the women shouldn’t be problematic for someone who has made a virtual art form out of exploiting discrepancies and secondary details of the Gospels.

Furthermore, even though Luke does not specifically refer to the two men as angels; the fact that he describes these beings as “men in clothes that gleamed as lighting” should have been a dead give away. Moreover, as a historian addressing a predominately Gentile audience, Doctor Luke—no doubt—measured his words carefully so as not to give rise unnecessarily to pagan superstitions.

Finally, as with Mark, the fact that Matthew only references one angel does not preclude the fact that two angels were present. After reading the accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke or John, for that matter, there is ample data by which a real historian can determine that the man described by Mark was indeed an angel and that “men in clothes that gleamed as lighting” were angelic, and that though Matthew only mentions an angel, he clearly does not preclude the possibility that another was present.

Contra Ehrman then, what credible scholars look for is a core set of reliable facts that either validate or invalidate historical accounts. Here, as elsewhere in the Gospels, one can objectively conclude that the core set of facts presented by the Gospel writers are authentic and reliable.

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. Also check out my Complete Bible Answer Book.

Recommended Resources: 

Memorable Keys to Essential Christian DOCTRINE

Yet, the more I read, the more it became apparent that Professor Bart D. Ehrman was hardly writing tongue-in-cheek. He seemed genuinely distraught that few pastors and even fewer church leaders had followed him in his literalistic walk-on-all-fours fundamentalist reading of the Biblical text.

As evidenced in the book, he recalls doing a four-week series in a Presbyterian church in North Carolina in which he reveled the hidden contradictions of the Bible. When he got done, he says a dear elderly old lady came up to me, and asked me in frustration, “Why have I never heard this before?” Ehrman recalls in the book gazing across the fellowship hall at the Presbyterian pastor and wondering why had that pastor never told that elderly lady? Was this pastor beset by some type of patronizing attitude that, Ehrman says, is so disturbingly common? Was he afraid to make waves? Was he afraid that historical information might destroy the faith of his congregation? Was he afraid that church leaders might not take kindly to the dissemination of that kind of information? Did church leaders actually put pressure on him to stick to the devotional meaning of the Bible and not tell his parishioners about all of its mistakes? Was he perhaps concerned about job security?^[1]

Well in the litany of distasteful motives that flooded through Ehrman’s mind that day one thought surely eluded him. Perhaps the pastor had carefully considered Ehrman’s regurgitated revelations and found them wanting. Perhaps, unlike Ehrman’s students at the University of North Carolina, the pastor knew that there was nothing particular in terms of new or troubling information in Ehrman’s hidden contradictions.

Well, the Presbyterian pastor might have well seen through Ehrman’s apparent contradictions. The truth is that most Christians in a largely biblically illiterate culture have not. As such Ehrman is succeeding in his stated mission to shake the faith of multitudes. In fact, he seems to be particularly proud of causing the faith of many of his students to waver. He overtly writes this in the book, “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.” ^[2]

Well as this Professor Gone Wild has managed to shake the faith of multitudes in the classroom, it is troubling that he is now succeeding in shaking the faith of multitudes in the culture as well. He’s doing it through Dateline, CNN, History Channel, and NPR. He’s systematically forwarding the notion that the Bible is not only hopelessly contradictory but in his opinion a dangerous book in which to believe.

He’s gone as far as to say that had we embraced The Gospel of Judas, which he loves, instead of the Gospel of John, which he doesn’t have much love for, we might well have avoided nothing less than the Holocaust itself.^[3] He not only ascribes anti-Semitic motives to John but he attributes apocalyptic sophistry to Jesus.^[4] As such he holds that the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who was misguided in predicting that his generation would experience the end of the world. By the way, he’s so enamored with the Gospel of Judas that in his view had we embraced its perspective we might well have never seen the death of six million Jews. That from a man who was converted to faith through Youth for Christ, received a diploma from Moody Bible Institute, received an undergraduate degree from Wheaton College and studied at Princeton. ^[5]

It is absolutely incredible to read his book where he says, “the Bible is filled with discrepancies, many of them irreconcilable contradictions. Moses did not write the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) and Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did not write the gospels…the exodus probably did not happen as described in the Old Testament. The conquest of the Promised Land is probably based on legend…its hard to know whether Moses actually existed and what, exactly the historical Jesus taught. The historical narratives of the Old Testament are filled with legendary fabrications and the book of Acts in the New Testament contains historically unreliable information…”^[6]

This list goes on and on but over the next few days, weeks, and months I’m going to address some of these contradictions, some of which he says have changed him from a fundamentalist Christian to a happy agnostic, and I’m gonna deal with them and demonstrate that they’re not inconsistencies at all. He is simply in many cases either playing a rigged game or knocking down straw men.

This is one of the many reasons that the mission and ministry of the Christian Research Institute must exist in these days. Some of the supposed contradictions I’ve dealt with in my Complete Bible Answer Book. 

Recommended Resource:

The Complete Bible Answer Book