Jesus authoritatively declared, “Thy Word is Truth” (John 17:17)! It is up to you to believe His claim that God’s Word is trustworthy or to reject as contradictory. Those who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and those who reject the truthfulness of Scripture have the same evidence and yet come to opposite conclusions. The same is true with Christ as the Son of God. Those who receive Him and those who reject Him as Savior have the same facts. One repudiates and one accepts. I will give one example of each: Bart Ehrman and Lee Strobel.
Bart Ehrman
Bart Ehrman (Misquoting Jesus [Kindle] HarperCollins e-books, 2005) formerly claimed to be a believer but, after studying the Gospels, became an atheist.
The blurb in Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus says that Ehrman chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is considered a leading authority on the early church and the life of Jesus; he has been featured in Time Magazine and NBC News. He is the author of twenty books and lives in Durham, North Carolina (Kindle location 3948).
In his book Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman recounts his journey from a born-again fundamentalist at Moody Bible Institute to an evangelical at Wheaton College to a liberal at Princeton Theological Seminary to eventually an agnostic/atheist at the University of North Carolina. Studying the Gospels radically transformed Ehrman from being a staunch defender of inerrancy to an aggressive opponent of inerrancy.
Ehrman testified that he was converted as a sophomore in high school. He immediately began to seriously study God’s Word and memorize it. Then he enrolled at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to study theology. In his preliminary study of textual criticism, he learned the basic fact that we no longer possess the original writings of God’s Word. This really troubled Ehrman because he was taught that God inspired the original autographs.
After Moody Bible Institute, Ehrman attended Wheaton College and studied Greek and Hebrew. Ehrman reasoned, that if God did not perform a miracle in preserving his Word, then we should not think God performed a miracle in inspiring it.
After Wheaton, Ehrman went to Princeton Theological Seminary. Ehrman finally concluded that all we have in the Bible is just another errant human book.
Bart Ehrman (2005) argues that the Bible cannot be trusted because it is hopelessly plagued with errors or variants:
With this abundance of evidence, what can we say about the total number of variants known today? Scholars differ significantly in their estimates— some say there are 200,000 variants known, some say 300,000, some say 400,000 or more! We do not know for sure because, despite impressive developments in computer technology, no one has yet been able to count them all. Perhaps, as I indicated earlier, it is best simply to leave the matter in comparative terms. There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament (Kindle location 1454).
Now at UNC-Chapel Hill, Ehrman is an evangelist for atheism and agnosticism, writing books, teaching college students, and debating Christian scholars that God’s Word is untrustworthy and Christ is not God. Ehrman, who started as a professing believer, became an atheist. Lee Strobel’s journey is just the opposite.
Lee Strobel
Lee Strobel, formerly an atheist, studied the same evidence that Ehrman researched and the same Gospels and became a believer. He tells his story in The Case for Christ. I will come back to Strobel’s story later.
Charles Ryrie (1999) correctly and theologically evaluates this issue:
The inerrancy question does not involve interpretive problems or debates concerning the best text type. However, problems of apparent discrepancies, conflicting numbers, differences in parallel accounts, or allegedly unscientific statements do concern the question of inerrancy. Errantists and inerrantists both have access to the same facts concerning each of these problems. Both have capable minds to interact with those facts. Both can read the conclusions of others. But they do not come to these problems with the same basic outlook. The errantist's outlook includes not only the possibility but the reality of his possible conclusions is that one or another of them is actually an error. The inerrant, on the other hand, has concluded that the Bible contains no errors” (Basic Theology, 107)
Again, the issue is not the evidence but our attitude about the evidence, and in this case, our attitude about God's Word reflects our attitude about God who inspired it.
Lee Strobel had the same Christian evidence as Bart Ehrman. Strobel went to Yale Law School Strobel and became an investigative journalist for the Chicago Tribune. He was an atheist. His wife Leslie started going to Willow Creek church and Strobel noticed positive changes in her lifestyle. He attended church with her at Willow Creek and heard Bill Hybel preach.
Lee Strobel, the Atheist
Strobel started what became a two-year investigation of Christianity. In the first year, he studied the Gospels. He wanted to know if the Gospels were historically accurate. Was there eyewitness verification of the events in the Gospels? Were there contradictions? Was the transmission of the text reliable since there were no original autographs? Was there outside corroboration of the New Testament? What about the Gnostic Gospels? So, Strobel sought out and interrogated leading theologians. They answered his questions.
Lee Strobel (The Case for Christ, Grand Rapids, 1998), in an interview, asked Bruce Metzger: “When I first found out that there are no surviving originals of the New Testament, I was really skeptical. I thought, if all we have are copies of copies of copies, how can I have confidence that the New Testament we have today bears any resemblance whatsoever to what was originally written? How do you respond to that?” Remember, this was the same question that Ehrman asked.
“That isn’t an issue that’s unique to the Bible,” Metzger replied and proceeded to defend his answer (p. 59).
Conservative Biblical scholars like Bruce Metzger (The Text of the New Testament pages 99-100) have full confidence in God’s Word, as he expressed to Lee Strobel. Bruce Metzger, Bart Ehrman’s Greek teacher at Princeton, in his interview with Lee Strobel (1998), argued that we can reproduce the contents of the original manuscripts:
In addition to Greek manuscripts, we also have translations of the gospel into other languages at a relatively early time---Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. And beyond that, we have what may be called secondary translations made a little later, like Armenian and Gothic. And a lot of others---Georgian, Ethiopian, a great variety. How does that help? Because even if we had no Greek manuscripts today, by piecing together the information from these translations from a relatively early date, we could actually reproduce the contents of the New Testament. In addition to that, even if we lost all the Greek manuscripts and the early translations, we could still reproduce the contents of the New Testament from the multiplicity of quotations in commentaries, sermons, letters, and so forth of the early church fathers” (p. 59).
Lee Strobel, the Seeker
Strobel ceased being an atheist and became a seeker. Next, he asked the scholars, "Who was Jesus?" He learned that Jesus claimed to be God (John 14:8-9), and Jesus performed miracles that gave evidence of his claims. The evidence convicted Strobel. The same evidence that Bart Ehrman had studied and rejected.
In the second year, Lee examined the resurrection of Jesus. All the time, his wife prayed for Stobel's salvation. Finally, on November 8th, 1981, Strobel entered his study with a legal pad. He drew a line down the middle and wrote on one side, "Positive Evidence," and on the other, he wrote "Negative Evidence." He then weighed the evidence and decided to trust Christ as his Savior.
Lee Strobel, the Believer
The impact of Christian evidence in Lee Strobel’s life, however, did not take place in a vacuum. He heard the Word of God preached by Hybel and witnessed to him by his wife. God used the evidence, but it was the Word of God under the convicting power of the Holy Spirit that drew him to Christ.
Can the Gospels be trusted? The evidence is there. It is up to you! “Choose you today whom you will serve.”
Some of the arguments Bart Ehrman against inerrancy
1. There are differences in the genealogies of Christ in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 which prove the Gospels untrue.
In a debate with Bible Scholar Craig Evans (2011) (click to open), Ehrman made the following accusations against God’s Word. Ehrman pointed out that Matthew 1:16 says that Jacob begat Joseph but Luke 3:23 records that Joseph was the son of Heli. Ehrman asks, which was it? Ehrman concludes, the genealogies differ and cannot be trusted.
What is the explanation for this apparent discrepancy?
1) Matthew’s Gospel traces Jesus back to David through Joseph and David's son Solomon (1:6) to show that Jesus had a legal and royal right to be Israel’s king. Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience to convince them Jesus is the Old Testament prophesied Messiah. Matthew records that the true Jewish father of Joseph was Jacob who "begat Joseph."
2) Luke’s Gospel traces Jesus back to David through Mary and David’s other son Nathan (3:31) to show that Jesus had the blood right to be King of the Jews. In Luke 3, Luke gives Mary’s father in the place of Joseph’s father. Luke does not say that Heli begat Joseph.
Lee Strobel (1998) in The Case for Christ asked Craig L. Blomberg about this alleged error and Blomberg presented a similar answer on page 47 which I just gave and Strobel was convinced and became a believer. Blomberg (1997) also gives this explanation in Jesus and The Gospels on page 208. There are two opposite reactions from Ehrman and Strobel to the same evidence.
2. Ehrman also argued that only John has Jesus claiming to be the Son of God.
In an interview with Ehrman by Ruth Graham (2014) with the Boston Globe, Ehrman stated: The problem is that Jesus only makes claims for himself as being divine in the Gospel of John .... But what scholars have long noted is that Jesus doesn’t say any of those things in Matthew, Mark, and Luke and that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are [written] much earlier than John .... What I argue in the book (How Jesus Became God) is that it’s virtually inconceivable that if it was known Jesus called himself God, that Matthew, Mark, and Luke would just leave that part out.
The rationale behind this argument is that when John wrote his gospel much later the legends of Jesus’ resurrection and deity had formulated and infiltrated his gospel.
I will mention only two of many passages in the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) where Jesus claimed deity and therefore, did not originate as a legend. In Mark 2:1-12 (not the Gospel of John) Jesus stated that he forgave a paraplegic's sins. Immediately after Jesus forgave the paraplegic’s sins, the Pharisees responded, “Why does this man speak blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God only?” They recognized that Jesus was acting like God who alone can forgive sins. They unknowingly spoke the truth about Jesus when they said only God can forgive sins. C. S. Lewis (1952) writes in Mere Christianity of the significance of Jesus telling a total stranger his sins were forgiven:
I mean the claim to forgive sins: any sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offenses against himself. You tread on my toes and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offenses. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history. Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is ‘humble and meek’ and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings (p. 51).
Ehrman's Boston Globe interviewer (2014) stated: “I kept thinking of C.S. Lewis’s idea that Jesus was either a lunatic, a liar, or the Lord, and that there are no other possibilities.”
Ehrman’s response: The problem is he left one option out. If you want to keep with “L”s, the option is “legend.” I’m not saying Jesus is a legend. But C.S. Lewis’s formulation is that Jesus called himself God, and if he called himself God, he was either telling the truth or he wasn’t. If he wasn’t telling the truth, he either knew it or he didn’t .... But Lewis doesn’t consider the idea that Jesus calling himself God could be legendary.
Again, in Mark, not the later Gospel of John, Jesus unequivocally claimed deity. The reason John recorded more claims, notice I said “more” not “all” claims, by Jesus to be God than the other Gospels is because that was John’s purpose in writing his Gospel as John 20:31 states. Again in Mark 14:62-63, Jesus claimed to be God and was condemned to death for his blasphemy. The High Priest asked Jesus, "Are you the Christ the Son of the Blessed One?" And Jesus said, “I am.” John D. Grassmick (1983) said, "The title Blessed One, found in this sense only here in the New Testament, is a Jewish substitute for God (cf. Mishnah Berachoth 7.3)" (Bible Knowledge Commentary, 183). The answer Jesus gave to the question, "Are you the Son of God?" was "I am." Sounds like one of the "I am" claims of Christ in John's Gospel. The Pharisees and scribes recognized Jesus’ claim to deity and so should Bart Ehrman.
Here is C. S. Lewis's in Mere Christianity famous observation that Jesus' claim to be the Son of God made Him either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord.
I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to (pp. 51-52).
I opened this chapter with Bart Ehrman ridiculing the Bible as untrustworthy because of hundreds of thousands of textual variants. Yet, Ehrman (2005), on another occasion, praised the value of textual criticism:
It is written for anyone who might be interested in seeing how we got our New Testament, seeing how in some instances we don’t even know what the words of the original writers were, seeing in what interesting ways these words occasionally got changed, and seeing how we might, through the application of some rather rigorous methods of analysis, reconstruct what those original words actually were (Kindle location 270).
Ehrman can’t have it both ways. The original autographs cannot be known because of so many textual variants and at the same time through the “rigorous methods” of textual criticism “reconstruct what those original words actually were.” I actually agree with Ehrman’s last conclusion. God who has exalted His Word above His own name has also preserved it for us to exalt in our lives.