Bart D. Ehrman

I'm a big fan of Bart Ehrman's writing and always glad to see a new title come out. I'll acknowledge that the quality of his books can vary, but they're always interesting—and Armageddon is among the very best.

In Armageddon, Ehrman sets out to explore the New Testament book of Revelations from multiple perspectives—
• The time in which the book was written and how it would likely have been originally understood
• Ways the book has been understood in subsequent historical periods
• The show more ways in which Revelations is most often understood within fundamentalist communities today
• The values espoused in Revelations
• A comparison with Revelations' values and those expressed in the gospels
• The places where contemporary culture and politics have been affected by Revelations

This is absolutely fascinating material. Ehrman talks readers through it clearly, with plenty of documentation, and a voice that never drifts into a tedious scholasticism. He closes the book with a brief final chapter that challenges readers to acknowledge the differences between the gospels and Revelations and to ponder which version of Christianity (if any) they currently practice.

Whether or not you identify as Christian (I don't), Armageddon offers a powerful read about about the values of our faiths and the consequences of those values.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own. show less

Reading this book was a long time in the works, as I've owned for many years but hadn't ginned up the courage to read it. I grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian family and church, where the Bible was taught as the all inspired inerrant word of God. I remember thinking as a young boy: maybe the original writers were inspired but the belief in the Bible's utter inerrancy would require every person over thousands of years to have been directly inspired, as well. Ehrman picked up on that same show more thread, and it led him to become a scholar in textual criticism.

He spends the early part of the book laying out the details of textual criticism and the latter half using the method to discuss several passages from the Bible and how they were altered by scribes over the millennia. This was an eye-opening read. And, while it didn't destroy my faith, it changed it in a fundamental way. I'm left, not with any disbelief in the Bible's message, but an understanding of how it's been shaped. It's a good place to start in looking more closely at the context of the Bible writing, as opposed to the Fundamentalist urge to use the writing as a weapon.

Ehrman haș his own critics, but that's part of the adventure in learning. You've got to be open to the information before you can sift through it toward an understanding.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!! show less

In his usual somewhat repetitive but detailed fashion, Ehrman goes about demolishing Dan Brown's claim of the truth of all the documents he based The Da Vinci Code on. It turns out Brown had no understanding of the documents his "experts" in the novel talk about, totally misrepresenting their content and meaning. For example, he claims that the Dead Sea Scrolls contains gospels, which they do not. The contents are all Jewish documents. He claims the word "companion" used to describe Mary show more Magdalene's relationship to Jesus meant spouse in Aramaic, again showing his ignorance of the non-canonical gospel he was using as his source, which only survives in a Coptic translation from Greek--not Aramaic. And the Coptic translation borrows the Greek word, which is quite common and quite clearly does not mean "spouse". The truth, of course, is that Brown stole the whole idea for his book from one published a few years earlier: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Still, Ehrman's explanation is interesting and he does a good job as his own narrator in the audiobook version. show less

This is one of Ehrman's lesser known titles, but it's one of his better ones. He really shines and illuminates when discussing the very first moments of christianity and even though he's discussed the people around Jesus in his other books, it's never to this depth. With the actual scriptures giving only a rough sketch, we need to delve into supporting materials, apocrypha, historical research and plain speculation and interpretation, and that's where it gets really interesting. How much of show more the stories around these principal characters were later inventions? How do theological battles figure into how they're portrayed? Did alternative christianities exist that would have ranked them differently (the battle between Peter and Paul is of particular interest here)? Making it about the other people of the Bible experiencing and interpreting the events makes the questions it prompts much more relatable. show less