Critics of the Bible

There has been much criticism of the Bible since the Enlightenment, but rather than go that far back, we will look at some contemporary critics. These critics have received a fair amount of press coverage, but their arguments are unconvincing.

The Jesus Seminar was a collection of liberal scholars who were seeking to find a consensus on whether the Bible contains the sayings of Jesus. This group has claimed that 82% of what Jesus said was not authentic and another 16% was doubtful. This puts 98% of Jesus’ saying in the category of pious fraud. However, the Jesus seminar is a group with an agenda. The 74 members represent the most liberal fringe of Biblical Scholarship, and more than half lack adequate credentials for the task at hand. In addition, their methodology has multiple flaws. Perhaps one of the most egregious principles of the group is that to be authentic, the sayings of Jesus must not resemble anything resembling Judaism in the first century or Christianity in the first century. That arbitrarily excludes most of what one would expect to find. Their research and resources seem to reflect a skepticism geared towards the discrediting of the authenticity of Scripture.

Daniel Brown, who self-identifies as an agnostic who has left the faith of his youth, has written several books reflecting his lack of belief. Perhaps the best known is the DaVinci Code, a conspiracy tale that attempts to debunk Biblical history. In his book and the following movie, he writes that the Bible is purely human, “The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God… Man created it as a historical record… History has never had a definitive version of the book.” He also comments, “Many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles, deceiving the stupid multitude.” Neither the book nor the movie claim to be scholarly works. They are fiction. Somewhat amazingly, many who either read the book or saw the movie accepted his many claims about Jesus and the Bible as factual, even though they can easily be shown to be false and without a basis in history.

Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and an agnostic. He writes both scholarly and popular literature. In his popular literature, he emphasizes and overstates biblical problems and promotes a view that the Bible is unreliable. However, he makes a much more nuanced case in his professional writing. He admits the Bible is a reliable document with no doctrine or belief at risk because of textural issues. He states that the NT MS copies differ in many thousands of places. He states these copies differ in so many places that we don’t even know how many differences there are. “Mark did not say the same thing as Luke. John is different from Matthew- not the same. Paul is different from Acts. And James is different from Paul.” However, he points out scribal errors, which are detectable and of little consequence and mostly involve spelling errors or variations.

Dr. James Tabor was a scholar and Bible translator with deist leanings. For him, no miracles were possible. He believed the Gospels have errors and contradictions. Miracle stories are not true. This would include the Virgin Birth since women do not get pregnant without a male, ever. He also rejected the resurrection because dead bodies don’t rise- not if one is clinically dead as Jesus surely was after the Roman crucifixion and three days in a tomb. Dr. Tabor arrives at his conclusions based on his underlying worldview, not based on any evidence that shows the Biblical miracles to be fraudulent.