I’ve enjoyed every book I’ve read by Bart Ehrman, including his latest, Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them). I only had time to read the first couple of chapters carefully (the publisher didn’t send a review copy), so I’ll only make a few remarks.

This book functions like volume three of a trilogy on the theme “how I lost my faith in God by becoming a bible scholar.” Misquoting Jesus and God’s Problem were the first two installments. Like those two books, Jesus Interrupted includes a fair amount of personal reflection by Ehrman on how the material covered in the book (about inconsistencies and errors in the Bible as we have it) contributed to changes in his own personal faith.

On the other hand, Ehrman is not a New Atheist. He carefully labels himself an agnostic, not an atheist; he doesn’t proselytize for atheism or agnosticism; and he is quite clear that, in his view, scholarly study of the Bible does not at all preclude retaining an active faith in God, the Bible, and whatever denomination one associates with. It just didn’t work that way for him. He expressly notes that it was not biblical criticism that changed his views:

There came a time when I left the faith. This was not because of what I learned through historical criticism, but because I could no longer reconcile my faith in God with the state of the world that I saw all around me.

He goes on to note that many of his academic friends have had a different experience:

All of my closest friends … in the guild of New Testament studies agree with most of my historical views of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, the development of the Christian faith, and other similar issues. … All of these friends, however, have remained committed Christians. Some teach in universities, some in seminaries and divinity schools. Some are ordained ministers. Most are active in their churches. HIstorical-critical approaches to the Bible came to many of them as a shock in seminary, but their faith withstood the shock.

I think Ehrman deserves a lot of credit for emphasizing the personal nature of the response to historical-critical bible studies in these books. He’s not trying to pop anyone’s faith bubble, just relate some of the general results of modern biblical studies in books directed to the general reader.

As for content, I thought Chapters Two and Three, a longish review of various contradictions and conflicting accounts in various biblical books, were a little tiresome, but for someone unfamiliar with those problems the material may be more worthwhile. Chapter Four, on the actual authorship of biblical books, was well done, as was Chapter Six on the canonization process, including a short discussion of the late emergence of orthodoxy and the creeds. It’s the sort of material that Evangelicals ought to be very familiar with before criticizing LDS faith claims.