As suggested above, Ehrman is critical of those researchers who just “happen” to discover in Jesus the same sorts of ideas and concerns which they themselves have. Reading their own beliefs into the early texts, Jesus becomes a tool for some to validate their own agendas:
- “...very few people who devote their lives to studying the historical Jesus actually want find a Jesus who is completely removed from our own time. What people want — especially when dealing with such potentially dry matters as history and such potentially inflammatory matters as religion — is relevance.”
Ehrman, unlike most, is willing to take seriously some of the more uncomfortable and unpleasant passages in the New Testament. In this, he follows in the tradition of Albert Schweitzer, one of the first to emphasize the darker nature of some of the things Jesus is recorded as having preached. Ehrman argues that Jesus really did mean it when he said that the “meek and poor” would inherit the earth because, for apocalyptic thinkers, the current world is one which is characterized by corruption and evil. Therefore, anyone who is “on top” in this world must be participating in that corruption and evil — which means that they will be unfit for the coming era of God’s Kingdom. Only those who are poor, meek, and in desperate straits must be righteous enough to deserve to inherit the coming revolution.
It is only natural that this vision of the future has been most popular with the poor and oppressed wherever Christianity spread. They could identifiy with the suffering of the early Hebrews, the suffering of Jesus and the promise of swift and certain justice. Institutions, however, have much to fear from such a vision — as a result, the organized Christian churches have rarely had anything very positive to say about those who get worked up about a coming apocalypse. Such a focus threatens the stability of the current social order upon which the churches depend.
Jesus certainly wasn’t the last to preach the approach of an apocalypse — Christian groups throughout history have relied upon his words to once again tell people that the “End is Near” and that they really should get ready. They, like Jesus, were always wrong — the world never ended, there was never a great destruction of the world, and things have pretty much continued as they always have. Some of these groups disappeared and some, like Christianity itself, found ways to reinterpret or revise the apocalyptic visions in order to achieve some measure of worldly stability.
Ehrmans book covers a lot of ground, from the nature of New Testament research to the study of the earliest records of Jesus and down through apocalyptic movements in Christian history. Fortunately, he writes well and it is easy to follow his arguments, even if you don’t always agree with them. There are certainly a lot of books available on Jesus, but if you are interested in the topic, this one deserves a place on your reading list.
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