Welcome to New Testament, RELI 2160-850. Before you do any thing else in this course, the place to begin is by reading the first chapter in Ehrman's book. There might be some occasions when you wonder why I chose this book as the textbook for this course (other than the fact that it has been the book used for this course at UNO for the past five years). First off, it is a good textbook even if it is over-priced like most textbooks. The second reason (and my main reason) is that Ehrman writes in a way that is easy to understand, even if you do not have much experience taking religion courses. Ehrman has a way of explaining topics that might seem strange to you without using lot of scholarly jargon.
That said, there will probably be times when you wonder where on earth Ehrman got an idea from, or why does he believe that? What you need to know about Ehrman is that he is a very astute scholar of Christianity, but he is not a Christian believer. Therefore, he has no personal stake in whether or not what the New Testament says is true is really true or whether events really happened the way the events in the New Testament are reported as having happened. Some of his ideas and theories might strike you as odd when they are actually "mainstream" among modern historical critical scholars. And then there are other opinions of his that are not widely accepted among biblical scholars. I will point those out to you. You will find that there are some statements that Ehrman will make that are also subtly intended to poke fun at Christian believers.
An important part of what Ehrman is doing in this textbook is following an approach to the study of early Christianity called the historical critical method (this is the term most often used for this method of biblical study). This is a method that developed over time during the first three-fourths of the 20th century that tends to be skeptical of the historical accuracy of the biblical material and generally holds that only those portions of the New Testament will be considered historically accurate that there a very high degree of certainty that it happened as narrated. I will write more later on the historical critical method, but as a rule, it tends to be skeptical of the historical value of the Gospels as they are found in the New Testament. Whether or not you find such arguments convincing is for you to decide.
In chapter one, page 1, Ehrman makes it clear that he is employing the "historical critical method" when he states: "I will be approaching it [the New Testament] from a historical perspective." His main focus then in the New Testament in its original historical/cultural milieu. That is why the first topic of study will be the historical/cultural/religious environment of Judaism in the time of Jesus and the larger Roman world of which that was a part.
But there is also a section in chapter one where Ehrman delves into a topic from a perspective that is not widely held even among historical critical scholars, and that is the section on the multiplicity of manuscripts. While most of the books in the New Testament were originally written before the end of the first century, we do not have any documents that old. The oldest complete copies of the New Testament were probably copied (by hand) about 350 CE (see Ehrman's note on the Common Era in "Box 1.3" on page 4). Ehrman believes that the scribes who copied and passed on these writings in the New Testament were often either careless or intentional in making changes to the texts to make them fit their own views. Ehrman is over-reaching when he states that these "intentional" changes add up to substantial alterations of the texts through the years.
Most scholars believe that the New Testament writings were faithfully copied and handed on through the years. There were some mistakes, but by comparing various manuscripts, in most cases scholars who are good at this business can decide what the original probably said. Ehrman is quite convinced that through the years (before 350 CE) intentional alterations were made so that the ideas in the New Testament writings more closely reflected the developing catholic faith, which finds its best early exposition in the Nicene Creed (circa 325 CE). Traditionally Christianity has believed that the New Testament writings contained (from the day of their composition) the basic ideas that formed the Nicene (catholic) faith (by catholic I mean the beliefs that are common to both the Roman Catholic Church and all of the Eastern Orthodox Church, there was little noticeable difference between them until the early middle ages).
Ehrman wants to believe that Christianity in the first century was much more theologically diverse than what we find in the New Testament, and that even the New Testament was more theologically diverse when originally written than what it is now. In this regard, Ehrman does not have as many scholars taking his view on this matter as he seems to think. My personal take on the matter is that the varieties of Christianity that Erhman sees as competing forms of Christianity (in competition with the Christianity represented by the New Testament) did not arise until the near middle of the second century, and after all the New Testament writings had been composed, and these competing forms of Christianity (Gnosticism in particular) arose in rebellion against the established form of the faith. They did not develop as a parallel religious phenomenon to what became catholic Christianity with its own set of traditions about Jesus (as Ehrman seems to believe) but arose as a reaction to the faith that eventually became Christianity - that was both orthodox and catholic.
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