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Honest to Jesus
A few weeks ahead of the Easter bunny, Bart Ehrman is back on the hardcover nonfiction list with “Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them),” which enters at No. 8. Back in 2006, Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had a surprise hit with “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible (and Why),” which spent nine weeks on the list. Ehrman — who grew up casually Episcopalian, became a fundamentalist in high school, had his faith eroded by decades of studying the Bible’s textual history and now calls himself a “happy agnostic” — seems to be riding the same anti-religion wave that has swept Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens onto the best-seller list and late-night talk shows. But he says that while they share some readers, he tries to distance himself from the so-called new atheists.
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“They seem to understand so little about religion,” he told me in a telephone interview. “If somebody attacked science with as little knowledge, they’d be laughed off the map.” Ehrman himself has certainly taken some knocks. Writing in Books & Culture, a magazine often referred to (deservedly) as a sort of Christian New York Review of Books, the scholar Robert H. Gundry took him to task for exaggerating the theological significance of some of the mistakes and inconsistencies inserted into the New Testament by generations of copyists, and for having too literal an idea of what it might mean for the Bible to be divinely inspired. Gundry also blasted Ehrman for his misleading title, but it turns out that Ehrman didn’t much like it either. “I wanted to call it ‘Lost in Transmission,’ but my publisher thought that people in the South would think it was about stock car racing,” he said. Is Ehrman worried that “Jesus, Interrupted” — another title chosen by his publisher — sounds like a chronicle of Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie’s adventures in a faith-based mental hospital? “It’s a really terrific title which I wish I had come up with,” he said. “The book is about how the voice of Jesus gets changed by all these other messages, and how these different voices are impeding the voice of Jesus. But some people have made jokes about coitus interruptus.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/books/review/InsideList-t.html
