For this week, I will come out with some personally revealed "Bible Secrets" from my own life before I dive into the personality of the day.
Bible Secret #1: I never enjoyed reading the bible. It was always a chore for me. I enjoyed some of the stories as a kid, but to sit down and read them from a bible with no pictures and small print wasn't at all fun for me. My Mom got me a Picture Bible when I was a teenager. She figured it out too. That was better. As an adult, I can't even say that I enjoyed reading. I felt that I had to to belong in Club Christianity. But I could never come to the joy of the experience.
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Bart Ehrman came into my life after Peter Enns started the disruption of scripture. I had already lost half the Jenga Tower of biblical inherency thanks to Pete... so when Bart came along, it was just more disruption and more rubble.
In 2020, I got my hands on "Jesus, Interuppted" and when I went to do my blog post on the book, I had found some joy with the discovery that Bart Erhman believed there was a real Jesus. Somehow I was glad this agnostic athiest and humanist bible scholar concluded that Jesus was real... because back in 2020, I still needed Jesus to be real in my life. It was one of the last ropes I had to hang on to hoping that most of my life wasn't dedicated to a fictitious creature from ancient mythology. It made sense that people goosed the story along the way, but at the heart of it, there seemed to be a real person that existed. Maybe there was something to that guy that made life different.
I dived into Bart's online blog and online courses. I wanted to understand more about the Bible. I still had no interest in reading it, but I was interested in hearing from someone that could read the bible in the language it was written in. I figured he could offer me more in context than my own reading in the English. My current collection in my Bart Erhman Thrive Cart is fourteen courses and one online conference. I soaked it all in... right up until a few months ago when his "Matthew" course came up for purchase. I struggled with the choice to add it to my collection, not because I didn't want it, but because I was already losing interest in Bart Ehrman's material. Matthew was a book that I had almost finished memorizing about twenty years ago. It was one of my favourite books of the Bible. It would have been one more purchase and maybe I would have enjoyed the content... but I had to come to the realization that my time with Bart was over. It was time to move on. I didn't purchase the course. If I change my mind, I can still buy it, but I haven't been in my Course Collection to go over any of the other material I bought. It's been over a couple months since I have listened to his "Misquoting Jesus' Podcast I used to enjoy so much. I loved the conversation he had with Megan Lewis, his co-host. I just stopped being interested. It really was time to move on.
All that being said... I have a lot of gratitude for Bart Ehrman and what he contributed to my journey. I started having an issue with one of his conclusions and maybe that weighed on me. Maybe it is okay to move on and listen to some other voices. Maybe it was never a good idea to get all my insight from one person. It's why I enjoy a multitude of voices. That is what I am trying to do here in Authentic Lent. I want to share the multitude of voices that have something to contribute to my journey.
What was the one issue? Stay tuned to hear about that on March 16 when I visit with the mythicists.
