Early Christians Got the Jesus Story Wrong, Author Says

Author Bart D. Ehrman says the earliest Christians changed the gospel into the stories we know now, according to his new book, Jesus Before the Gospels.  

According to the book website, the gospels were spread orally before written out, giving the disciples opportunity to embellish Jesus and change some of His attributes.  

“It was these remembered/altered/invented stories that the Gospel writers themselves inherited and then edited (and thus changed) when they wrote them down when producing our Gospels. What does knowing about the processes of memory and about oral cultures who transmit their traditions by word of mouth, tell us about the nature of the Gospels, the communities that stood behind them and the historicity of the traditions they relate?” Ehrman says.  

But Christians like The Gospel Coalition’s Michael Kruger poke holes in many of Ehrman’s arguments. 

“Ehrman mistakenly assumes early Christianity was an “oral culture.” He repeats this claim throughout the book and uses it as a basis for his main thesis: “Traditions in oral cultures do not remain the same over time, but change rapidly, repeatedly and extensively” (183). The problem, of course, is Ehrman simply declares Christianity was an oral culture without ever demonstrating it,” Kruger writes in his review. 

“As I’ve argued elsewhere, Christianity was decidedly not an oral culture. That a vast majority of adherents are illiterate isn’t a sufficient basis on which to declare a religion to have an ‘oral culture.’ Although it sounds paradoxical, religions can have a culture of ‘textuality’ even if the majority of its adherents cannot read.” 

This is not Ehrman’s first bout with controversy, though. He previously penned How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee and Misquoting Jesus.  

Even talk show host Stephen Colbert took Ehrman to task for his bold criticism of the gospel.