Bart D. Ehrman - The Bane of Fundies!

[Godscreated]

A passage from Ehrman's "Jesus Interrupted" in which he begins to point out some of the many errors or contradictions in the fundies' so-called inerrant bible.

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For students who come into seminary with a view that the Bible is completely, absolutely, one hundred percent without error, the realization that most critical scholars have a very different view can come as a real shock to their systems. And once these students open the floodgates by admitting there might be mistakes in the Bible, their understanding of Scripture takes a radical turn. The more they read the text carefully and intensely, the more mistakes they find, and they begin to see that in fact the Bible makes better sense if you acknowledge its inconsistencies instead of staunchly insisting that there aren’t any, even when they are staring you in the face. To be sure, many beginning students are expert at reconciling differences among the Gospels. For example, the Gospel of Mark indicates that it was in the last week of his life that Jesus “cleansed the Temple” by overturning the tables of the money changers and saying, “This is to be a house of prayer . . . but you have made it a den of thieves” (Mark 11), whereas according to John this happened at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry (John 2). Some readers have thought that Jesus must have cleansed the Temple twice, once at the beginning of his ministry and once at the end. But that would mean that neither Mark nor John tells the “true” story, since in both accounts he cleanses the temple only once. Moreover, is this reconciliation of the two accounts historically plausible? If Jesus made a disruption in the temple at the beginning of his ministry, why wasn’t he arrested by the authorities then? Once one comes to realize that the Bible might have discrepancies it is possible to see that the Gospels of Mark and John might want to teach something different about the cleansing of the Temple, and so they have located the event to two different times of Jesus’ ministry. Historically speaking, then, the accounts are not reconcilable.

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Let's see if any of them will come to the defense of their fairy tale vision of things.

What makes you think that John had to place the event, cleansing the temple, at a certain place in his writings. John's gospel is not one written to convey a straight line historical account. Only Luke's gospel tries in any way to tell a historical account and this was not his main intention. All four gospels were written as a wittness about Jesus and the order of the events are not that important, the spiritual truth is the great importance of the gospels. If you will look at the gospels the events are not always in the same order from gospel to gospel Mark and Luke are the ones with close time lines. We actually do not know which events happened when so as far as the event cleansing the temple is concerned John may have it in the proper order.