NPR Ponders the Apocalypse

A happy fisk of Terry Gross interviewing Barth Ehrman.

Photo by Paul Zoetemeijer on Unsplash

Well, Holy Week is off to a great start—my noise at the end of Tenebrae, thanks to the awesome engineering efforts of Good Shepherd’s Staff (pun intended), was super loud. Tonight we have lots more church, and I have a thousand things to do today. But first, I have a special treat for us. Bart Ehrman was interviewed by Terry Gross about his new book about Revelation and how dangerous it is for Evangelicals and others to read it (Revelation that is, not his book. Dr. Ehrman really wants you to read his book) and stuff. The underlings (I imagine) at NPR very helpfully transcribed the whole thing, so I have some nice bits for us. Let’s launch right in. After the various introductions, and Ehrman explaining what his book is about, they have this exchange:

GROSS: It really reads like the screenplay of, like, an action-horror film.

EHRMAN: Well, it does. And I think the thing is that most people understand where action-horror films are going, but most people have real trouble figuring out Revelation. It's really - it's one of these books that people know about but almost nobody reads. And the people who start reading it find it so confusing and so bizarre, they just give up, and they never get to the end, with the exception of evangelical or fundamentalist Christians who use it to kind of mine for - to - you know, for pieces of the puzzle that will explain what's going to happen in the future.

Ah yes, the dummy evangelical who reads it even though it is, according to Ehrman, objectively impossible to understand, and, of course, not true.