Super Intellectual Oblivious to the Obvious

In the March 5th edition of the Washington Post there is an article by Neely Tucker called “The Book of Bart,” on the New York Times best-seller, Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman. Former Christian, now agnostic and chair of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ehrman argues that the textual variances in the many New Testament manuscripts are so numerous and significant that upon examining them an honest person will have to realize the sea of ambiguity and contradiction into which orthodox Christianity sinks.

Ben Witherington has a lucid critique of Ehrman’s book posted on his blog: benwitherington.blogspot.com, under the March 2006 archives. In it he reprints a great review of Ehrman's book from Daniel Wallace of bible.org. I hope everyone familiar with Ehrman and his arguments will read these.

But my concern here is not Ehrman’s arguments on textual criticisms but on his reasoning for ceasing to believe in God.

The WP article says the following about his losing faith:
“For Ehrman, the dark sparkling bubbles cascaded out of him while teaching a class at Rutgers University on ‘The Problem of Suffering in Biblical Traditions.’ It was the mid-1980s, the Ethiopian famine was in full swing. Starving infants, mass death. Ehrman came to believe that not only was there no evidence of Jesus being divine, but neither was there a God paying attention.
‘I just began to lose it,’ Ehrman says now, in a conversation that stretches from late afternoon into the evening. ‘It wasn't for lack of trying. But I just couldn't believe there was a God in charge of this mess . . .’”

But then it goes on to describe Ehrman’s lifestyle and what compensates for his sense of emptiness now that he no longer believes:
“Ehrman tools home from campus on a recent morning in his BMW convertible. He has a lovely house in the countryside, a wife who loves him and an ever-growing career. He is, he says, a ‘happy agnostic.’ That emptiness he felt as a teenager is still there, but he fills it with family, friends, work and the finer things in life.
He thinks that when you die, there are no Pearly Gates.
‘I think you just cease to exist, like the mosquito you swatted yesterday.’"

Certainly one doesn’t have to be a super scholar to see a discrepancy here: Perhaps if Ehrman sent some of the excess money he spends on a convertible BMW and other “finer things” to people in places like Ethiopia there would be less poverty and disease in the world to blame God for.

But then again, perhaps his financial reasoning is sound. After all, if our existence is no more eternally significant than “the mosquito you swatted yesterday,” then how important could it be to help those starving “mosquitoes” in Africa?

MM