Ben Witherington is a world class New Testament scholar, so when he reviews Bart Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know Them, one must give due weight to his critique. Witherington offers his review in three segments (so far), here, here, and here. Update: Ssgment four is here, and five here. Segment six is here.
Extra: Stephen Colbert interviewed Ehrman about his new book. Colbert, as one commentator said, "is at the top of his game" in this interview. Witherington offers a comment:
Hail:
Actually Bart is dead wrong about early Christology, and I
think he even knows it. Its pretty hard to miss Phil. 2.5-11, written
before any Gospel probably. There it is said not only that Christ is
"in very nature God" even before he takes on human form, but then on
top of that Paul quotes and applies Isaiah to Christ after the
ascension saying he has the name above all names, which very clearly in
Isaiah is the name of God. The transfer of the LXX name for God
'kyrios' to Christ is clearly enough a statement about his divinity. In
addition to which in Romans 9.5 Christ is called "God above all blessed
forever".
Furthermore, the Synoptic Gospels most certainly do
view Christ as divine. This is why he is portrayed as Immanuel for
example in Matthew's Gospel, or as the human and also divine Son of Man
of Daniel 7 fame who came from heaven to judge the world and will rule
in a kingdom for ever (see Mk. 14.62).
Ehrman's retro
arguments about such things don't even convince most liberal scholars
these days, they just say that Paul was divinizing Jesus because they
know he had an exalted view of Christ.
As for Colbert, he is a
devout Catholic who teaches Sunday school, and is not much interested
in making fun of any orthodox Christians.
Happy Easter,
Update 4/24/09: Justin Taylor offers this excerpt from Witherington:
One of the problems however with some of Bart’s popular work, including
this book, is that it does not follow the age old adage--“before you
boil down, you need to have first boiled it up.” By this I mean Bart
Ehrman, so far as I can see, and I would be glad to be proved wrong
about this fact, has never done the necessary laboring in the scholarly
vineyard to be in a position to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted
from a position of long study and knowledge of New Testament Studies.
He has never written a scholarly monograph on NT theology or exegesis.
He has never written a scholarly commentary on any New Testament book
whatsoever! His area of expertise is in textual criticism, and he has
certainly written works like The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture,
which have been variously reviewed, not to mention severely critiqued
by other textual critics such as Gordon D. Fee, and his own mentor
Bruce Metzger (whom I also did some study with). He is thus, in the
guild of the Society of Biblical Literature a specialist in text
criticism, but even in this realm he does not represent what might be
called a majority view on such matters.
It is understandable how a textual critic might write a book like Misquoting Jesus,
on the basis of long study of the underpinnings of textual criticism
and its history and praxis. It is mystifying however why he would
attempt to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted
which frankly reflect no in-depth interaction at all with exegetes,
theologians, and even most historians of the NT period of whatever
faith or no faith at all. A quick perusal of the footnotes to this
book, reveal mostly cross-references to Ehrman’s earlier popular works,
with a few exceptions sprinkled in—for example Raymond Brown and E.P
Sanders, the former long dead, the latter long retired. What is
especially telling and odd about this is Bart does not much reflect a
knowledge of the exegetical or historical study of the text in the last
thirty years. It’s as if he is basing his judgments on things he read
whilst in Princeton Seminary. And that was a long time ago frankly.
It
is not sufficient to reply that Bart is writing for a popular audience
and thus we would not expect much scholarly discussion even in the
footnotes. Even in a work of this sort, we would expect some good up to
date bibliography for those disposed to do further study, not merely
copious cross-references to one’s other popular level books. Contrast
for example, my last Harper book What Have They Done with Jesus? The
impression is left, even if untrue, that Ehrman’s actual knowledge of
and interaction with NT historians, exegetes, and theologians has been
and is superficial and this has led to overly tendentious and
superficial analysis. Again, I would be glad to be proved wrong about
this, but it would certainly appear I am not. This book could have been
written by an intelligent skeptical person who had no more than a
seminary level acquaintance and expertise in the field of NT studies
itself. And I do not say this lightly, for this book manifests problems
in all areas, if one critiques it on the basis of NT scholarship of the
last thirty or so years. There are methodological problems, historical
problems, exegetical problems, theological problems, and
epistemological problems with this book, to mention but a few areas.