Ehrman on Christianity

The Picture is a surprisingly intimate one of the Great Hall of the Vatican Library, which, bizarrely, reminds me a little of a 'Dr Who' TARDIS.

To make a little money, I teach A-level as well as undergraduate students. I find it stimulating and fun, and I have the good luck to be associated with an independent college that teaches both international students of high ability and less wealthy, but very hard-working students on bursaries from London. I've taught economics, law, history and religious studies.

Teaching is even better than writing for refreshing and adding to knowledge about things, and contrary to common misperceptions, it is more than possible to choose rigorous examination papers. When I teach religion, for instance, I tend to choose the Jewish scriptural exegesis offered by various boards. In the story of multiple covenants, the struggle for Jewish identity between Judah and Israel, and the historical study of the Jewish people, one can be reminded of the importance of words and traditions to an often desperate community. I have the added indulgence that I get to read the King James Bible quite often for cash.

That the papers require people to understand the construction of the Tanakh and Torah also in terms of archaeology, of the gaps in what we can verify and what is ambiguous, and of the determination of the compilers of the bible to defend their identity fiercely against Hellenistic, Persian and local polytheism is the icing on the cake.

There are mornings when I come out of a tutorial feeling part of a culture that grew up around the Mediterranean rim--all around it-- and which was then hardened in the rains of northern Europe's mountains and dark. Europe's three pillars are nominally the European communities, the foreign and security co-operation, and the justice and home affairs structure of the European Union; actually, they are Greece, Rome and Israel, and the law and civilisation that flows from them.

I was, of course, not raised in a tradition that required absolute biblical adherence, which anyway strikes me as a Scots-Irish and predominantly American phenomenon. Once, an Italian woman taught me Hebrew, just a little, at her kitchen table in Bologna, near what I think was the San Felice gate. In jumping between her Latin, Hebrew, and the slow french we spoke when she was too tired for English, I got a sense of how ambiguous language is, how nuanced, and how dangerous and silly it was to demand absolute truth from the translated words of translations compiled centuries after an event.

It's amazing how much we do not know. A hundred year old man, talking to a sixteen year old, can communicate stories from when he was sixteen, and give that youth if he ages to a hundred an effective memory of nearly two hundred years. Ten such men would stretch back to Christ. Yet, such is the way that documentary truth, evidence and memory work that no one could ever take any such story on trust, I would have thought. Biblical scholarship, which attempts so hard to verify is therefore exhilarating, and new disputes arise all the time. It was only the other week, for instance, that the idea that Essenes even existed was questioned. I've been following the dispute as a bystander, but was surprised by the way a largely ignorant media jumped all over Rachel Elior's ideas.

So I was pleased this morning to find one of my favourite Biblical scholars, Bart Ehrman, given a long interview in Salon.com by Gary Kamiya. Salon is an American liberal paper, but which is much more sensible than the term suggests to a European used to the posturing of the left here. Ehrman was a fundamentalist; but, years ago, he pursued his studies of the new testament, learned the languages, and adopted the appropriate respect for those who were around him or who went before.

Now, he is an agnostic. He isn't some vulgar, silly atheist, full of the certainty of their own intellectual numinosity and the efficiency of philistinism. He acknowledges and respects those whose views differ, and he illuminates a difference Pope Benedict's fine mind played upon before he assumed the papacy, of the difference between Christ and Jesus. Christ is an ideal prefigured by Apollo, Pythagoras, Elijah, Joshua and the other emanations that played over the continents separated by the waves of Marmara two thousand years ago. Jesus was clearly a millenarian Jew who was also something much more.

None of this is heresy. St Augustine and St Thomas, indirectly, both dwelt upon the distinction in their ways, and, like Joseph Ratzinger, concluded that the crucifixion and resurrection, if christianity is true, must be a moment resonant in time, echoed before and after and outside of everything. Catholicism is flexible like that; the ineffable revelation and the limited but effective reason go together at some undisclosed point, and no religion of pure reason or pure faith work.

Have a read of the Ehrman article. I obviously have a different understanding of faith than Ehrman, but I am in awe of his scholarship, and also of how he fulfills the role of university professor which, at various points in my life, I have tried to fulfill here and there. He makes people think, he is open and accessible, and he attempts to verify and to question, and to show how it can be done.

If you are faithful, certain in your theism or atheism, it shouldn't matter that he challenges you or causes you to question; but these are good things. Salon can often be annoying, but it was a pleasure to read it as passion week looms.