Bart Ehrman’s latest book, “Jesus, Interrupted”, may be his best. Ehrman has written several controversial books over the years, but this book does more than sport a controversial title. It dives deeper into the author’s own experience and provides a behind the scenes glimpse into the world of literary criticism. By sharing his own journey, he opened up the world of literary criticism to a wider audience, and he dispelled several of the myths surrounding the discipline. Like his earlier best seller, “Misquoting Jesus”, this latest book includes the healthy doses of biblical criticism that we’ve come to expect from Ehrman. However, this time he went beyond his usual examples of discrepancies between the thousands of early manuscripts. This book continues by investigating the impact of this historical critical method on the big picture. Keeping the talk about discrepancies and errors to one chapter, he had space to dive deeper into topics about early Christianity, the authorship of the New Testament books, the canonization process, and the impact of biblical criticism on theology. One question provides the underlying theme of the book, “why has this information been common knowledge in seminaries around the world for two centuries, yet, so many mainstream Christians today are completely unaware?”

“Scholars of the Bible have made significant progress in understanding the Bible over the past two hundred years, building on archaeological discoveries, advances in our knowledge of the ancient Hebrew and Greek languages in which the books of Scripture were originally written, and deep and penetrating historical, literary, and textual analyses.
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Yet such views of the Bible are virtually unknown among the population at large. In no small measure this is because those of us who spend our professional lives studying the Bible have not done a good job communicating this knowledge to the general public and because many pastors who learned this material in seminary have, for a variety of reasons, no shared it with their parishioners.”

I enjoyed reading a bit more of Bart Ehrman’s personal story because I think we’ve had similar adventures in faith. I can relate to his early years in a fundamentalist church, his brief period of disenchantment, and his current religious status as something less than “certain”. We don’t exactly agree eye to eye, but mostly, I relate to his infatuation with the Bible. In this book, Ehrman shatters the myth that biblical criticism is an attempt to belittle the bible. His dedication to the Bible comes through. In fact, he concludes with a chapter that makes the case for religious faith entitled “Is Faith Possible?”

My favorite chapter is a discussion of the historical Jesus and a description of the nature of historical studies in general. In this chapter, titled “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord”, Ehrman dismantles the short sighted logic of the famous and often quoted C.S. Lewis argument. Thanks to a more robust understanding of our ancient texts, we now have a fourth option that Lewis was not willing to include. It turns out this forth option, “Legend”, is the most probable answer.

I need to give a big thanks to TheOoze Viral Blogger network for hooking me up with a copy of this book to review.