Interesting interview on Gospel authorship
NPR’s Fresh Air interviewed Bart Ehrman, the author of Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them. You can listen to the interview here, and here’s a bit of what he has to say:
He says that each Gospel writer had a different message — and that readers should not "smash the four Gospels into one big Gospel and think that [they] get the true understanding."
"When Matthew was writing, he didn’t intend for somebody … to interpret his Gospel in light of what some other author said. He had his own message," Ehrman tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross.
In the Gospel of Mark, for instance, Jesus dies in agony, unsure of the reason he must die and asking why God has forsaken him. But in the book of Luke, Jesus prays for forgiveness for his killers. The two stories offer very different accounts, says Ehrman, yet many people tend to merge them.
"They put the two accounts into one big account," says Ehrman. "So Jesus says all the things that he says in Mark and in Luke, and thereby robbing each account of what it’s trying to say about Jesus in the face of death. … What people do is, by combining these Gospels in their head into one Gospel, they, in effect, have written their own Gospel, which is completely unlike any of the Gospels of the New Testament."
People should read the Bible for themselves and they would see the different writings and interpretations of the gospels’ authors and other books’ authors and the different tellings of the same story as it appears in consequent versions of tellings. After all, the Bible began as many, many years of oral story telling. I have read the Bible through cover to cover three times (plus innumerable times as separate verses and passages) and find it an extremely valuable book.
the sister
21 March 2009 at 3:59 pm
The Bible is a collection of writings, probably exclusively the work of men, written over a long period of time. The choice of what was to be included in the Bible was made in the fourth century by the council of Nicea under the direction of the emperor Constantine. The decisions as to what books to save and which to exclude were based not only on spiritual considerations, but also political concerns. The printing press was just over a thousand years in the future, and so every copy of every book was the work of scribes. There weren’t many copies of any book, and so it was relatively easy to gather up religious writings that were not to be included in the Bible and destroy them. A few of the noncanonical works survived, however, and they have been the cause of some consternation among the faithful. Myself, I don’t take the Bible as gospel.
Jack
21 March 2009 at 5:28 pm
The Bible is probably exclusively the work of men because, in the area and era it was being early developed, the work of women’s roles widely differed from men’s. Women bore children, cared for them, saw that everyone was fed (without modern conveniences), did laundry with rocks and streams. Women did not have time for formal education such as the schools where the boys were sent to learn history and writing. Many of the brightest of these boys were chosen to become scribes. Over the time of copying of the scriptures, small and large mistakes were made in copying. Can you imagine eyes getting dim with age, or sleepy, dusk drawing near, whatever instrument they were writing with or whatever scroll they were using; what a task it must have been to bring the scriptures as we know them forward into the days of the Nicean council. And then the decisions to leave out such items as the gospel of Thomas? Then to the Protestant reformation when Martin Luther begrudgingly thought that old new testament letter of James (my favorite book in my Bibles) could be included in the Bible. And today there are differences among canons such as Jehovah’s Witnesses’, the Roman Catholic Church’s, different translations, different paraphrases, the apocrypha. Jesus was in the midst of political concerns; he was a rebel. Politics has been there all along and it is here with us today.
the sister
21 March 2009 at 6:29 pm
And I’m not forgetting other holy scriptures.
the sister
21 March 2009 at 6:30 pm
Other holy scriptures meaning of different faiths or “religions.”
the sister
21 March 2009 at 6:37 pm