Some of you know about Dr. Bart Ehrman. For those who don't, Dr. Ehrman is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and has written several books including Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, in which he includes some biographical material. In this book, Ehrman recounts how he became a Christian through a youth ministry while in high school, and he claimed to have had a genuine "born again" experience (although he doesn't give any details of what that experience was for him). With the encouragement of the charismatic youth leader, he began a quest to understand the Bible. He went on to Moody Bible Institute, a conservative, fundamental Bible college, from there to Wheaton College, and from there to Princeton Theological Seminary. Throughout this time, he maintained the belief he had learned at Moody that the Bible was inerrant. In a class at Princeton, he was assigned to write a paper in which he attempted to explain the apparent contradiction between Mark 2:25-26 and 1 Sam. 21:1-6. (It concerns the accounts of David taking the consecrated bread for food from the priest. Mark quotes Jesus as saying it was in the "days of Abiathar"—understood to mean when Abiathar was high priest, while Samuel states it was when Ahimelech, Abiathar's father, was the priest.) When he got the paper back, the instructor had written on it, "Maybe Mark just made a mistake." Ehrman says that once he accepted that possibility, his beliefs about the Bible and God began to unravel. Eventually, he discarded virtually all he had held true and today describes himself as a "happy agnostic."
In his book Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman explains how scribes, who copied Bible texts by hand in the days before printing, made changes, either accidentally or deliberately (attempting to clarify something or maybe even promote their own perspective). His point is that we do not, and perhaps never will, arrive at the original texts, which are claimed to be inspired by God. (This wouldn't matter to an agnostic or atheist anyway, since there is no such thing as a real inspired text from God.) He claims many changes were made to bring discrepancies into agreement.
This brings me to a question about this issue. Starting with the text in Mark, if you could go back to the original manuscript of Mark, and you assume this account of David taking the bread from the high priest was fabricated, why did the author make an obvious mistake? Surely he was aware of what was written in Samuel. And even if the original text of Mark was written this way, why didn't a copyist somewhere make the correction? Surely somebody noticed.
There have been attempts to explain this difference. I can see one possibility myself. But reconciling this or any other particular problem isn't what I'm after. Now a question about changes: why was this, or any other discrepancy for that matter, allowed to stand if scribes were so diligent to make corrections? Why were any discrepancies allowed to stand for us to account for? Why wasn't everything cleaned up? Also, if these discrepancies had been seen by the early churches and the ecclesiastical councils as a problem the way modern readers do, wouldn't they have been even more selective in what they accepted? To me, these are obvious issues produced from his presentation, but Ehrman makes no attempt to answer them, as though he is not even aware there could be problems with his explanation. It leaves me wondering if he considered other possibilities, or if he just simply abandoned all credibility of the Bible as if that were the only option. (Surprisingly, the possibility that a copyist error could account for the difference in Mark was not considered anywhere.)
Is it possible that early readers of the texts did not see these differences as problems the way we do? Is it possible that later scholars have applied standards to the texts that are not appropriate? Are we requiring more of the texts than they require of themselves? We think we know so much, with our developed critical thinking skills. Should our opinions be valued so much more than those of people who lived in close proximity to the time and culture when the manuscripts were written? It seems to me that all he has done is challenge the credibility of a specific, narrow understanding (which he held at one time) of the Bible texts that perhaps was never expected in the first place.
I don't have a problem with Ehrman presenting his issues about the Bible (he does not bring out anything new). I think the issues should be examined, but his conclusions are not automatic: that because God did not protect the texts from copyists introducing changes, we do not have the original words, therefore we cannot know what the "inspired" words to us were, which doesn't really matter because if God didn't take care of protecting the texts, he doesn't exist, so the Bible is totally man-made anyway.
Ehrman doesn't have much to say about how he dealt with this on a personal level. I wish he had. Perhaps he felt it was not relevant, but I think it is. In a Q & A section in the back of the book, he said the real issue for him was not the problems of the texts, but the philosophical issue of how a good God could allow pain, suffering, and evil in the world—interesting. He also said he plans a forthcoming book through Harper in which it looks like he may have something to say about his personal journey. I hope so.