This is not the end of your faith... at least not necessarily. In two key books, Apocalyptic Prophet (about the historic Jesus) and Misquoting Jesus (about the New Testament), Dr. Ehrman searches the most reliably accurate parts of the gospels to better understand who Jesus was. From this effort, Ehrman makes an exceedingly strong case that Jesus was a human product of his time, not of All Time.
This is hard reading for Christians because Ehrman, formerly a Christian, methodically examines other historical sources along with the oldest surviving materials of the New Testament to make informed, rational, evidence-based arguments consistent with proven principles of scholarship. He's not pulling this stuff out of the air — in fact, much of it has been long-proved but ignored — and he's well aware of the crisis this awareness can cause. But evidence in the text and subtext of Jesus' message shows that Jesus’ life was altogether human. His story, however, made a compelling impression that took on a life of its own almost immediately. Ehrman traces where emphases, errors and additions were made to the Jesus story from the start, possibly while he was still alive. (Possibly, even by him.)
But it became a powerful story, one that his followers couldn't let go of. Many of us still can't.
Ehrman's point is that the actual Yeshua from Nazareth, however, was simply not the character that emerged through First Century fan fiction. We don’t know a lot about that former “Jesus,” the actual person. But the latter legendary Jesus stood the test of time because, for good and for ill, the canonical gospels allowed believers from different times, cultures and contexts to emphasize those parts of the official story that they most craved. And even with all the tampering the story received as a result, some of the underlying ideas communicated by the mortal Yeshua from Nazareth gave us a lot to work with over the last twenty centuries. The world was sorely ready for that man's radical ethical message -- all the more contagious because he mixed it with an equally radical license of apocalyptic urgency. It was a powerful combination, but flawed. The actual Yeshua believed that the world, a mistakenly tiny world, was about to end in a spectacle of doom and magic. He wasn’t the first cultural prophet to bet his life on such beliefs, and to be wrong. We know now that history wasn't over. He was in fact writing history, in ways he never imagined.
So the personal question Christians are left with after considering Ehrman's work is: What do we do with God, without Jesus as God? For some, faith dies without religion. Ehrman went from being an evangelical fundamentalist 'Bible college' Christian to a moderate, literate Christian, and ultimately an agnostic heavily influenced by the New Atheism. He had very good reasons for this, and his journey was painful and real. But the same route isn't for everyone.
The truth is, if you're a Christian who has seriously read Ehrman's work then you've already crossed the Rubicon into literate faith. Literal faith is over for you, whether you recognize it or not. You probably don't need a textual historian to convince you that Earth is more than 5700 years old, that theocracy is disastrous, that the Left Behind series is reckless huxterism. You may have already come to the conclusion that God wants you to be rational and intellectually honest, and that loving God -- however less certainly you view God now -- involves doing so with the mind you were given. Sometimes faith dies. But as the Jesus legend demonstrates, sometimes that's also how we experience faith anew. It's possible that Ehrman's theses have been on your spiritual reading list all along; that it's your time to encounter these facts about the faith, and to be further changed into the thinking spiritual person you're meant to be.
If so, welcome again to the Emmaus Road, where God no longer has the face you knew. For what it's worth, you're not traveling alone.
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colin sweet
Did Jesus really believe the world would end within the lifetime of his apostles?
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