Carolina QuotesFor the only reason (I came to think) for God to inspire the Bible would be so that his people would have his actual words; but if he really wanted to have his actual words, surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he had miraculously inspired them in the first place.
Bart D. Ehrman Carolinian
Source
Conclusion
- work
- Misquoting Jesus (2005)
- year
- 2005
Cite this record
“For the only reason (I came to think) for God to inspire the…” Bart D. Ehrman. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E1EE34D920. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e1ee34d920
More from Bart D. Ehrman
How does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don't have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don't have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.
If the findings of historical criticism are right, then some kinds of theological claims are certainly to be judged as inadequate and wrong-headed. It would be impossible, I should think, to argue that the Bible is a unified whole, inerrant in all its parts, inspired by God in every way. It can’t be that. There are too many divergences, discrepancies, contradictions; too many alternative ways of looking at the same issue, alternatives that often are at odds with one another. The Bible is not a unity, it is a massive plurality. God did not write the Bible, people did.
Judas's act of "betrayal" is in fact his faithful obedience to Jesus' will.