At church we're having some discussions about Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, an interesting read. I wrote this to the guy who's facilitating the discussions:
On the book, I think it’s rather astonishing just how ignorant the average person of faith is about these matters, myself included. That’s my first comment, which comes with some questions to boot: Why? Why don’t we know these things? Is it because church leaders are afraid the faithful will run for the hills when we find out our book is not inerrant and pristine but rather in many ways just as human as any other book (though unique in some significant ways too)?
Ehrman concludes that even if we speak of the original text as inspired, since we don’t have the original text it doesn’t make sense to call OUR Bible inspired. This raised two lines of questioning for me. First, does the Bible need to be inspired for it to be authoritative? Would it be okay for a person of faith to say, “This book is normative for my life not because it’s inspired but because it has been normative for Christians for two millennia and the experience of this historic community, which testifies to the text’s authority, is good enough for me because I too am a member of this community.” Does the whole category of inspiration presuppose an unhealthy dichotomy between the material world and the spiritual, the fleshly and the divine? These are questions worth asking, I think.
Second, whether or not one believes the Bible is inspired depends on one’s criteria for that inspiration. If you believe the only way the Bible can be inspired is if it is error free and original and blah blah blech, then sure, our book is not inspired. But if you believe its inspiration has far more to do with the communities who gave birth to these texts, then speaking of its inspiration makes all the sense in the world.
