Having your cake and eating it, too! . Now that we have had the benefit of over two centuries of historical-critical biblical studies, we might now very well ask:  Where do we go from here?  I would offer that the fundamental working hypothesis of such studies is that "they made it all up" and so the scholarly task becomes one of reconstructing that process, but the unquestionable assumption behind it all is that anything, positively anything, is more credible than traditional Christian faith (this is amounts to, for the critical scholars, a doctrine of "justification by doubt").      And so the game proceeds.  Canonical scripture is called upon, and even appealed to, when it can be interpreted to support the working assumption that nothing at all is what it might seem when it comes to Christian origins.  But whenever scripture supports a traditional understanding, then it is systematically demolished, discredited, decoded, and rejected as the purely ideological product it most assuredly is.  And all of the other texts, the schismatic, heterodox materials and the Gnostic drivel--which the Church had its apostolic reasons to reject--must simply be seen for what they are, and not evidence of Christianity's original "denominational" condition.    Bart Ehrman is a most clever and educated man, but, contrary to what some might assume, he DOES approach the material at hand with a clear bias and set of preconceived understandings.  So let's forget all the by now stale appeals to scholarly objectivity (not to mention, personal integrity) and letting "the sources speak for themselves", because that is just so much fantasizing as well.  Traditional Christian faith is dismissed by Ehrman and his ilk as being simply one more product of identifiable historical forces and thus it has no intrinsic claim to truth.  But try reading the Bible with the assumption that it is all true, that what it tells us about who Jesus of Nazareth is, and the beginnings of His Church are a reliable enough account of what did happen.  I realize that such an enterprise is inconceivable to the scholarly guild (with the refreshing exception of people like Luke Timothy Johnson and N.T. Wright), but philology is not faith, and in the end, it should never even be considered as a basis for it.      Ehrman's reconstructions are thus of interest only to a person who would treat any kind of 'faith' resulting from it as a kind of personal plaything, and not as the daily challenge to his own being. Remember, Christian faith is ultimately about God and our relationship with Him, and not about the way in which we might choose to arrange the intellectual games we play with faith and our musings upon it.     If you are interested in keeping God at arm's length and not dealing with real issues of personal growth and spiritual integrity (the kind that comes not from footnotes but from abiding in the Holy Spirit), then buy this book, read it, and enjoy whatever feelings of superiority it might give you.  But if not, if you are seeking the one, true living God who awaits those who would believe in Him through His Son Jesus, who is the Christ, then forget about it and all the other 'ragings of the pagans'.  You see, they are the ones you will be able to spot on the closeout shelf.
Output: NEG