"Misquoting Jesus"

My most-faithfully-read blog is Andrew Sullivan's. Andrew is interesting. A political conservative (which I definitely am not) who is openly gay, and who voted for John Kerry. I don't agree with Andrew on everything, for sure. Andrew wishes that Bush would have managed the Iraq War more competently. I think a more competent president never would have take us into this war in the first place.

Anyway, Andrew is also a Christian, a Roman Catholic, and he's shown some interest lately in Bart Ehrman's new book "Misquoting Jesus." Today he shares with us a link to this critique of Ehrman by another scholar, Ben Witherington.

Ehrman was an "evangelical" (or maybe, more accurately, a Fundamentalist) educated at the Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College and later Princeton. When he went into the field of textual criticism, his faith in the Bible was apparently shaken. The text was not as reliable as he once believed it was, apparently. So now Ehrman is an agnostic.

This seems to be one of the dangers of being a Biblical literalist--if one's faith is in the text of the Bible rather than in the God of the Bible, one might be setting oneself up for a fall. This is one of the problems of "Bibliolatry"--the making of an idol, or false god, of the Bible. Witherington offers a helpful criticism of Ehrman that might help the lay people who read Ehrman's book from getting too carried away by Ehrman's "revelations"--none of which are new in the field of the textual criticism of the Bible.