Misjudgment, misfortune, or just plain foolishness. Anyway, I had a little extra time to read this past vacation. So when I opened ‘Forged’, Bart Ehrman’s latest popular level work on Biblical criticism, only minutes after finishing Sarah Held Evans’ ‘Evolving in Monkeytown’, I knew it would be a great lesson in contrast. Both Ehrman and Evans tell a similar story of conservative roots. Ehrman began his forge into academia a conservative, born again evangelical. In fact, it was his love of Scripture that led him to his criticism of it. He began his education at Moody, graduated from Wheaton, and earned his PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary under the advisory of Bruce Metzger. If Evans’ story is an illustration of how a faith can evolve in the face of adversity, Ehrman’s illustrates what can happen when faith is not free to converse with evidence. In Ehrman’s case, when his study began to conflict with what he believed to be true about God’s word, more was lost than just his view of Biblical inerrancy.
Let me begin by saying I like Ehrman. I like his writing. I like his honesty. I like his perspectives. I like his willingness make the discussions usually held among the egg-heads accessible to intellectual simpletons like myself. He is both an expert and good communicator. Forged is much like Ehrman’s previously popular books, Misquoting Jesus (an introduction to textual criticism that questions the reliability of the Gospels) and Jesus Interrupted (a look at Bible contradictions) in that it brings the issues and developments raised by modern NT textual criticism to the non-scholar. He’s open about his now deceased faith as a ‘Fundamental Christian’ and uses his story as a bit of a straw man that fell hard in the face of reason and evidence.
In Forged, Ehrman aims to inform [his] readers about an important ancient literary phenomenon, correct mistakes that other scholars have made, invoke the reader to think more deeply about the roles of lies and deception in the Christian religion, to show the irony in the fact that lies and deception have historically been used to establish the ‘truth’, make the reader aware that there may be forgeries in the New Testament, to share interesting stories about intriguing and relatively unknown writings from antiquity, and finally, to entertain [his ]readers.
