Wounded by their own Words

     It is well known that Bart Erhman is out for revenge.  His constant stream of books and articles, his appearance on television programs, all of which focus on the historical criticism of the scriptures and the New Testament times.  His books on the history of the writing of the scriptures and how they were subject to errors and to theological biases are all the response to his anger and frustration at being deceived by the Christian community in which he was reared.

     Dr. Erhman was converted, as he has told us, in a very strict evangelical, fundamentalist congregation. He was told and he accepted that the Bible was the word of God and every word in the Bible was inspired and divine. He was told the Bible was the inerrant word of God. He was so devoted to that theology that he wanted to be a Biblical scholar.  When in his studies of the Scripture he began to learn the truth about the vast number of manuscripts of the Bible and how many different readings there were to so many different passages, he began to discover that the Bible was not without its human dimension.  He discovered that he had been lied to by all those preachers. The Bible was not inerrant as a text.  His response has been to engage in attacks upon the Bible and Christianity ever since.

     What perhaps is not as well known is that Reza Aslan, who is the author of the much discussed book Zealot: The life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, was also converted from Islam by an evangelical Christian community.  As an adolescent living in the USA he was converted to Christianity in a fundamentalist church.  Once again, as an undergraduate he encountered the critical biblical scholarship that exposed the shaky foundations of that fundamentalist message. He abandoned Christianity and returned to his roots as a Muslim.  Now he, also, is writing books that criticize the basic message of the Christian faith.

     "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." but the Christian faith is also discovering that "that woman" has a match in a fundamentalist convert who discovers that the proclamation of an inerrant Bible is a lie.  The Bible is indeed, an inspired book, inspired by the faith of the humans who wrote it and the message of the presence of a Holy One in the midst of History is good news, but the text that tells that story is as flawed as any other book that is published.