Bart Ehrman's Flawed Historical Methodology: The Angels at the Tomb

I enjoy reading Bart Ehrman’s books, as I think that they are generally well written, thought provoking, and informative. His books attacking Christianity stand in stark contrast to the garbage heap of sensationalist nonsense found in books by, e.g., Richard Carrier, Robert Price, and Reza Aslan (none of the works of these three are taken seriously by well-informed people). Bart Ehrman has, after all, spent decades studying and teaching the New Testament at research universities; and he is a world-class textual critic of the New Testament. There is no question that he knows what he is talking about. However, I believe that many of his arguments and methodologies are flawed. Take the following example.

On pp.134-5 of his book, “How Jesus became God,” (Harper Collins, 2014) Ehrman talks about the discrepancies and the contradictions that he alleges litter the Gospel records. Of particular interest to me is the following excerpt:

I should stress that some of these differences can scarcely be reconciled unless you do a lot of interpretive gymnastics when reading the texts. For example, what does one one do with the fact that the women apparently meet different people at the tomb? In Mark, they meet one man; in Luke, two men; and in Matthew, one angel. The way this discrepancy is sometimes reconciled, by readers who can’t accept that there could be a genuine discrepancy in the text, is by saying that the women actually met two angels at the tomb. Matthew mentions only one of them but never denies there was a second one; moreover, the angels were in human guise, so Luke claims they were two men; Mark also mistakes the angels as men but mentions only one, not two, without denying there were two. And so the problem is easily solved. But it is solved in a very curious way indeed, for this solution is saying, in effect, that what really happened is what is not narrated by any of these Gospels: for none of them mentions two angels! This way of interpreting the texts does so by imagining a new text that is unlike any of the others, so as to reconcile the four to one another. Anyone is certainly free to construct their own Gospel if they want to, but that’s probably not the best way to interpret the Gospels that we already have [emphasis is mine].

This is a flawed historical methodology if there ever was one. Now, I am not a fan of trying to straitjacket the gospel accounts into some implausible harmonization. However, the key word here is “implausible.” Ruling out harmonization in principle and tout court, which seems to be what Ehrman is implicitly advocating here, is simply bad historical method. Plausible harmonizations are plausible harmonizations; and implausible harmonizations are implausible harmonizations. It is the latter type of harmonizations that we should resist, not the former. Ehrman’s emboldened statements above belie his deeply flawed historical epistemology. He does not seem to understand, or he chooses to ignore, the fact that historical records are, by their very nature, limited accounts of what happened in the past. That means that no single historical record will record every event with all its details. There will always be some relevant pieces of information that the author either wittingly or unwittingly omits. When there are multiple (relatively early) accounts concerning what happened at a particular event E, the historian’s job is to critically evaluate these multiple accounts in order to ascertain a more complete picture of E. If the historian’s reconstruction of what happened at E is not identical to what any of the records say, and does not contradict them, then that is completely fine—with the proviso that the historian’s reconstruction is plausible. As is clear from the above-quoted excerpt, Ehrman seems to believe that any such attempt to use the Gospels to ascertain a more complete picture of what happened, and which is not included in any single gospel, is creating “a new text” and one’s “own gospel.” But this is simply wrongheaded. Imagine if Ehrman’s methodology were adopted by criminal prosecutors. Every time they would try to use a multiplicity of eyewitness-testimony in order to coherently reconstruct a crime scene that goes beyond any single individual testimony, they would have to remind themselves to stop, for they are coming up with “a new testimony,”—viz., “their own.” Clearly this would be a stifling and unjustified methodology on the part of these prosecutors. So there is nothing in principle that is wrong with harmonizing the gospel accounts—again, with the proviso that the harmonization is plausible.

And in this case, I think that the harmonization is eminently plausible. Some of the Gospel authors emphasized one angel over the other, and some called them men. Mark doesn’t “mistake” the angels as men, as claims the strawman-harmonizer that Ehrman sets up. Rather, Mark explicitly states that the “young man” was dressed in a white robe, traditional angelic garb; the best explanation is that he was just describing what he believed to be an angel in the guise of a man (especially given the testimony of Matthew and Luke). There is no problem here: in Judaism angels would not infrequently appear in the form of men; just look at Genesis 18 and Joshua 5. So the essential harmonization that Ehrman singles out is actually, to my mind, quite plausible. One wonders why Ehrman would single out this discrepancy when there is such a good explanation of it. Aren’t there better examples to choose from?