Jesus Before the Gospels

Someone at one of my book clubs pressed Jesus Before the Gospels (#590) by Bart D. Ehrman on me and told me I had to read it.  Of course, she didn't warn me that her copy was filled with her own underlining and notes, so to me, it was totally unreadable.  The first few pages I skimmed were interesting enough that I did get a clean copy from the library.




Dr. Ehrman has subtitled his book How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior, which pretty much tells you what this book is about.  Being relatively new to this kind of study myself, I have often wondered why it took so long to write down stories about Jesus - it took at least forty years before any records by his followers were committed to writing.  That's an awfully long time to remember things so precisely.  Have you ever, as a child, played the game of Gossip where everyone sits in a circle?  The first player whispers a sentence to the person next to him or her, who in turn passes it on the next person in the circle, until finally the last person hears it and recites aloud what he has heard to the original player.  Hilarity generally ensued, the message being so distorted by the time it arrived at its final destination.  If that can happen in just a few minutes delay with a limited number of players all in the same room, what then was changed before Jesus' stories were copied down?  How much of what we know of His story is in fact "Gospel Truth"?




Dr. Ehrman cites a number of interesting studies in making his points.  The book is easy to read for laypersons, but I must admit that about halfway through, I began to find it repetitious.  Although he provides much food for thought here, I was also taken aback when at about that same point in the book, he casually mentions as he is making a point, that he used to be a "committed Christian".  What does that make him today, and what is his motivation for writing this book?  As the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, perhaps it's a situation of "publish or perish".  His book does offer insights into why and how people remember what they do, but I still came away from reading this with reservations.