It Doesn't Matter if Jesus Rose from the Dead if Bart Ehrman Irritates You

Bart Ehrman is one cool cat.

Instagram recently showed me this Easter-time video interview between biblical scholar and author Bart Ehrman and New York Times conservative columnist (centrist?) Ross Douthat.

The interview is simple on the surface, meant to be of interest to folks during Easter this past April, but it gets at a key Christian construct not limited to Easter: Did Jesus physically, bodily rise from the dead?

I study religion too, but not like Ehrman. I’m more interested in how religious people behave: that you can learn a lot about them from how they practice their religion, and that they often say one thing and do another. You can see it even in nonverbal behavior: how they carry themselves, the tone and use of their voices, their facial expressions, the way they pay attention to some in a room and not others. There are psychological origins and effects involved. There’s always much more going on besides the presenting conversation.

So I’m not debating the resurrection here, not in any detailed way at least.

What fascinates me is the behavior in the interview itself. Watch the video above, but pay less attention to the logic and premises and more to the body language, eye contact, and vocal tone. They might be subtle, but they are there. They are always there.

Ehrman speaks with calm confidence that comes from spending a lifetime studying religious texts. He’s out in public speaking, often about his bestselling books:

• Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why,

• Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them),

• and out this past March, Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West.

  
  

Honestly, I sometimes find Ehrman’s work a little dense or long-running, and I say that as a PhD in religion. But I get it. He’s a scholar of sacred texts and has to have his facts straight, especially because people seem to rush to debate him. You can gather that just by watching him speak.

But I wish we would resist the temptation to debate Ehrman and just ask him clarifying questions, to just learn a little of what he’s learned. Why is that so hard?

There’s so much to the actual study of the Bible, not the Wednesday night “inductive” Bible study that goes on all across the country, but even just a hint of solid biblical scholarship, which you don’t always need a PhD to join in on, if you do it honestly. In fact, I wish pastors would better balance their devotional, confessional, and very American motivational sermons with more discussion of Ehrman’s or similar books, because they’re fascinating. Scribes made errors and never really made exact copies of early written versions of oral stories and teachings? As someone who applies psychoanalytic critique, which shows that the unconscious is always causing us to do things our conscious mind doesn’t realize we’re doing, this comes as absolutely no surprise to me. Paul didn’t write all the epistles, and some were forgeries? As a publishing person, this also comes as no surprise. The gospels are narratives, not eyewitness accounts, and often contradict each other? That’s some amazing history of religion, and I’d rather think about that than endlessly, if not obsessively, making a “case for Christ” bodily coming back to life after decomposing for three days.

But what really caught my attention in this interview was Douthat’s facial expressions. Even if briefly, I saw a flash of mild irritation and maybe a little incredulity, while Ehrman calmly responds to each challenge. Ehrman draws on decades of scholarship on this topic, and offers his own, well-examined and considered conclusions. While Douthat is intelligent, educated, well-read and well-written, has interviewed many smart people, and is simply trying to do his job, he can’t possibly be an equal debating partner, yet he still seems to want to argue with Ehrman. As he struggles, you can see moments where he seems a little unsettled.

And if you think I’m exaggerating, just read some of the snarky, bad-faith comments underneath the post itself. A lot of people get unsettled by Ehrman, who’s just trying to be a good biblical scholar. Why is it so hard for them to be curious?

Sigmund Freud once wrote that for many people, belief in God isn’t just a propositional idea—it’s part of the psychological structure holding society and morality together. So when they encounter someone who no longer believes, especially someone thoughtful and well-grounded, it is experienced as unsettling, even a threat.

Because if a person can reject accepted and widely normalized ideas about religion and still live meaningfully, ethically, and intelligently, then others who are embedded in a too-tightly constructed system are forced to confront uncomfortable questions. A religious system based on telling stories for moral interest but relies on a literal belief in a biological, bodily rising from the dead simply steps out of its reach and goes against science. Freud said in The Future of an Illusion that people are often ready to accept science, but when they haven’t let the facts of science inform their unconscious, emotional attachments, then they will experience discomfort, feel destabilized, and even act out.

In this case, Ehrman is providing deeply researched, well-constructed thinking, and all that work has likely challenged him to expand the strongly religious world into which he was born—to be more inclusive of different possibilities, to be less attached to what he thought he knew, and in essence, to be more mature about his religion, whatever that might be. His work has created a change in him, what could be called new psychological structure. But maybe not so much for Douthat, who, like so many of us, keeps living by the same structure and never confronts uncomfortable truths. That tension shows up nonverbally.

So here’s the question I keep coming back to:

Who actually appears more respectful and caring here? Or in other words, who is acting more like a Christian—the one who is defending a belief or the one open to possibilities he’s spent a lifetime studying? Who is being more spiritually mature and more curious and creative—the person who is speaking articulately and from expert knowledge or the one trying to defend the reanimation of the physical body of a dead Jesus?