Regardless of your opinion on Jesus or Christianity, Jesus, Interrupted is likely to challenge you, challenge the mind and provoke thought.
Jesus, Interrupted Details
In the book Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them), a New York Times Bestseller, Bart Ehrman picks up where his first book, the New York Times bestselling Misquoting Jesus, left off.
Jesus, Interrupted addresses the larger issue of what the New Testament actually teaches--and it's not what most people think.
With a number of claims sure to outrage and engage, Ehrman's arguments include, among several others, the following:
- Jesus, Paul, Matthew, and John all appear to represent fundamentally different religions
- Established Christian doctrines--such as the suffering messiah, the divinity of Jesus, and the trinity--were the inventions of later theologians
- The authors of the New Testament have very divergent views about who Jesus was and what the nature of salvation is.
- The New Testament contains books that were forged in the names of the apostles by Christian writers who didn't actually live until decades after Jesus' death
Though these arguments are not his alone, Ehrman places each of them within the viewpoints of scholars across a wide spectrum of denominations and traditions, and then attempts to discover why these "truths" have been so effectively buried by the power structures inherent in traditional religious organizations. Anybody with an interest in the Bible or the life and teachings of Jesus Christ would be wise to examine these texts through the critical lens developed by Ehrman – they might just draw some new conclusions.