The Five Stages of Grief

The following is a re-worked copy of the original essay that inspired my book.  My book is currently two-thirds of the way done... the third part - which discusses how I deal with life after faith - is still being lived.

About three years ago I discovered I had a terminal illness. I was at work, and all day something was bothering me. There was a group of fundamentalists in America who were proclaiming that today was the day that Jesus Christ would return, and I thought it was laughable but also sad.  How sad that they have all placed their hope so sincerely in something that obviously wasn’t going to happen. As I thought about these people, something else started nagging at me.  As a Christian myself, am I any less laughable?  After all, I too believe Jesus Christ will return, I just don’t have a date set in my calendar for it.

It was that day that I discovered I was terminal.  My faith was dying.

As a born-again Christian, a practicing, devout, sincere, whole-hearted Christian for basically my whole life, this was dire news.  I battled with this disease for three years, trying to come to terms with this faith that was so close to death. 

Denial.

I went home from work that day figuratively wringing my hands.  I must ignore this doubt.  We all have doubts. I myself have had lots of doubts.  This is no different. God will see me through. I pushed the thought from my mind. Ignore the doubts, and they will go away.

Yet my mind kept churning through this thought in spite of my resistance.  Jesus did say that “this” generation (his disciples’ generation) would not pass without the Second Coming.   I’ve heard sermons on this my whole life.  I’ve explained this away to many people myself. “This” generation is a metaphor.  “A day in our eyes is like a 1000 years in God’s.” He was referring to something else.  I always accepted all those answers.  But plain is plain. Jesus was wrong. Or he was very unnecessarily cryptic. Either way, that generation and many others, did pass away, and we’ve yet to be taken into Glory.

From here, everything began to unravel.  Like a cancer spreading, the foolishness of my sincerely held, and intellectually held, I might add, belief began to deteriorate and poison my whole life.  I tried and tried to deny what was happening, but denial has never been much of a comfort to me.  As a Christian and as a person, I have always been honest with myself.  I knew, as much as I hated knowing, that my faith really was on its death bed, and something had to be done about it.

Bargaining.

So I lived on. I churched on. I prayed on. Oh, did I pray. I prayed with fervour I rarely prayed with before. I begged God for another chance. I begged for a renewal of my faith. I requested help and prayer from others. I read online articles from other people in my situation and conversed on forums.  I told God I would continue living the Christian life, I would continue to honor and worship him despite my doubts, if he would just reward me one day with a genuine faith again. By this time, my head was completely sceptical, but my heart was still with Jesus.  I read a book about cell memory of the heart and came to believe that maybe faith really did live in the physical heart, and all I needed to do was let my heart rule over my head. It sounded so utterly foolish, but it’s all I had left.  I would live this out to my dying day, if only to be rewarded with my place in heaven and a crown of jewels for carrying this cross.

The faith was still a spark in my heart.  I took that as a sign that God was still there, not letting go of me entirely. This was just a test of my faith. I had always put so much stock in the truth of Sola Scriptura. Maybe God was taking me further, to a deeper place I’d never known. I would pass this test.

Yet with each question my dying faith brought up, I already had the answers. I’d been studying God’s Word and sharing my faith with people my whole life.  There were no new answers to be found. I realized that for every question on the test, I automatically knew the answer.  They’d been answered long ago, but insufficiently.  Sufficient for an existing faith perhaps, but entirely useless to a fledgling non-believer.  If this test was for my benefit, what could I possibly stand to gain from already having all the answers?

Depression

I felt beaten.  As all this was taking place in my heart, my church was crumbling around me.  I’d always believed in my church, with all its flaws – flaws I never once pretended weren’t there – but I accepted them all the same. Why? Because I believed the people to have genuine, Christ-like hearts.  Sadly at this point, even that was falling apart around me.  My husband and I left.  He was done with Christianity, but I wasn’t ready to give up.  Still in the Bargaining phase as depression began to wipe over me, I went out in search of a new church. All I found was emptiness. Finally, I found a church with wonderful people with whom I felt I could share a little of my painful honesty without judgment, and there I stayed until we moved out of town. 

I was feeling crushed under my burden. I told myself again the Christian answers – You’re trying to do this too much on your own. You are trying to get to heaven by works not faith. But there was no hope for the alternative. I was clearly on my own here.  No God was answering my pleas. No faith was buoying me above the water.  Sinking, crushed, burdened, I was going through life trying to hold onto something that was never going to be mine again.  Death was calling; the truth was too clear for me to ignore but too agonizing to accept.  I continued on slowly, with my heavy yoke upon my neck and no friend in Jesus to help carry my load.

I found a new church in my new town.  Beyond anything I’d ever expected, it was a Lutheran church. Never before would I have considered going “practically Catholic”, but this place touched my soul in new ways.  Eagerly, I wondered if this was finally it. God was finally reaching back down to me.  All of this was NOT for naught!  I began taking communion again, loving this new Lutheran concept of the “real presence of Jesus Christ” being in the elements.  I felt something on Sundays when I was there. I might struggle all week long, but on Sundays...

Then one day I heard my six year old daughter telling her friend that Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit were all one called the Trinity, and if you didn’t love God you would go to hell. I cringed. What a horrible thing to believe, a horrible thing to teach my child! I realized then and there that I truly had been deceiving myself these past few months.  I wanted to believe that my faith was returning so badly that I allowed myself to be swept up in the precious, sweet sentiment of it all.  But when spoken of in the bright of day, so plainly, so academically, I knew I didn’t believe a word of it. I didn’t like the sound of it at all.

Anger

I thought at this point I’d reached Acceptance.  We found friends who were in the same place as us, previous Christians who left their faith and were, like us, trying to figure out how to live without it. With them, I felt understood and accepted.  We all understood each other’s unfolding religious experience at its most complex level.  I felt I could actually maybe embark on this new life-after-death after all. I really could accept that this was the new me.

Slowly, however, I realized there was a quiet rage underneath the surface.  It only boiled up every now and again, and not too hotly, but it was simmering. I felt it when I went out for drinks with a Christian friend. She was telling us about some things she had done and someone remarked what a good person she was.  She cast her eyes down and said, “Not really, but thanks.”  She meant it. I knew she meant it and wasn’t just being modest; I knew it because that’s how a true, good Christian feels.  All the good they do, all the right decisions they make, all the people they help really mean nothing because at the end of the day, we are all filth. We are scum.  We are sinful beings God cannot deign to look upon without the covering of Jesus’ blood.  I wanted to shout “But you ARE good!” I thought back on my own life, my own right decisions, the people I helped, my lifestyle in general. All I ever tried to do, even with all the mistakes I made along the way, was be good. And I really was good! It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I’d been put down by my faith my whole life and made to believe I was shit.  The times when I dared to recognize that I kind of was okay, I shot myself right back down for having too much pride.  Pride proved that I really wasn't any good at all.

The gurgling volcano of anger began erupting now and again in other ways.  I would read a Christian article, or hear a Christian viewpoint, and find myself raging at it. I could never go back to believing those things. Even though a small part of me still wished fervently for just a blind faith to wash over me and let me be at peace instead of that constant spiritual masochism, I also knew I never wanted to be on that side of those viewpoints again. Even if I did come back around to having faith, I could never have faith in all of it.  I found myself especially annoyed when I read things about why people leave the church or leave the faith, written from the viewpoint of someone still in it.  Though I truly sympathized with their ignorance on the matter, (I myself having been one of them for decades), I was frustrated by how simplistic and egotistical their proposals are.  If anyone realized the sheer agony I’d been through for the past three years on this awful journey, they wouldn’t be able to take it so lightly or flippantly.  They wouldn’t be able to safely put me in a box and lock me away, as a friend put it.

You see, that term “spiritual masochist” speaks deeply to me.  It describes who I’ve always been. Unlike what “they” would like to believe, I wasn’t a seed scattered on the path or sown amongst the thorns or cast into the rocky places.  Rather, I’ve always over-searched my heart, ripped apart all the layers to find the truth of my soul.  I believed in God and the Bible in spite of my conscious, intellectual doubts, and I never lied to myself about those doubts. I took my ability to still believe as a gift from God, for I knew it was all foolishness to the wise.  Strip the faith away though, and I was left with oozing open wounds that I still tore and slashed at, amongst my cries and tears, trying to find the truth in the gash.  I felt certain that few Western Christians have ever been to the excruciating lengths I had been going through to keep my faith alive.  I spent years flagellating myself in the name of God to believe I was nothing, and there I was flagellating myself again to try and find some living cell within my incurable, terminal faith on which I could rebuild a self I didn’t even want anymore.  I had been beating and bruising myself over this, and could not stop, and I discovered I was actually very angry about it. I thought I’d by-passed the Anger stage, but there I was, boiling over at any unexpected stimuli. Was I angry that I was raised in a Christian home? Not at all. My parents believe whole-heartedly in Jesus as I once did. Of course they would raise their offspring to place their treasures in heaven and aspire for eternal salvation.  Was I angry that God has dropped me when I always believed he never would, never could? Extremely.  If there was a God at all, I felt I must be his toy Barbie he impaled with a knife and was melting over a spitfire just for amusement and laughs. I had been left to die with no savior to rescue me, just lies and manipulation.

Acceptance.

I didn't know how I’d ever be ready to accept entirely that my faith was dead.  I was still afraid of death, both spiritual and physical. I feared I was failing the test, and for that, I was going to be eternally punished. I still liked the idea of Jesus.  I still liked what he taught and what he stood for.  I still wanted to live by those principles and guide my children in those ways.  No one ever regretted being a good person.  But to believe 85% of the Bible and to believe that God will come to your rescue if you truly ask with all your heart are things I could not do.

I was stepping into a sunnier forest, just one without a set path.  I was afraid to forge my own, because I’d been taught my whole life that I am not able to.  To find your own way is to turn your back on the Lord.  Yet the Lord had turned his back on me already, so I really had no choice. I had children at tender ages to raise.  I had my own life to figure out.  I was afraid to come into Acceptance, because I knew that it would mean I had truly died.  I knew it’s around the bend, but I was still frightened. Frightened I was wrong. Frightened I was right. Worried how I would hurt my family who loves me.  Worried I’d do wrong by my kids.  I was in no rush to find Acceptance of my situation, but I was done with the search. I thought, “If the God of the Bible is truly the God of Love, he will pull me back in like the one lost sheep, but I’m not holding my breath.”  I was finding it hard enough to breathe as it was.

Then one day, while dwelling on God abandoning me, a thought struck me.  God never abandoned me at all; God just doesn’t exist! Of course, the possibility that God might not exist had been with me throughout the entire journey, but the sudden realization felt like someone opening the door of a dark room and letting in the daylight.  I felt like rubbing my eyes with the wonder of it, the excitement of it, the joy of it.

And like that, my anger dissipated.  Well, not really.  My anger at God was gone, because it was like being angry at the Easter Bunny.  How could I be angry at something that doesn’t exist, never existed?  He hadn’t abandoned me, so what was there to be upset about?  But I was still angry at other things. Angry at thirty years of a life wasted on a myth.  Angry at my ignorance.  Angry at myself for all the things I’d done in the name of God that I was now ashamed of.  Angry at missing out on all the riches of the world we live in because I was busy thinking about the next world. I was angry in general, but now had no one to be angry with.

The months went by.  Gradually I noticed my anger subsiding.  At first, I didn’t know how to relate to the world as a verified non-believer.  I didn’t know if I was a good person or a bad one.  I didn’t know how people would relate to me.  If they knew I was – dare I say it – an atheist, would they all turn on me?

I kept this terrifying word to myself, but as time went on, I realized how well it fit who I was now.  I was so thankful to have a husband and friends who were stumbling along this journey with me.  It was a little embarrassing to realize I was only for the first time truly trying to think for myself.  I had to push back the temptation to latch on to other non-believers’ opinions in search of my own beliefs – or non-beliefs.  At first, all of my atheistic feelings were tinged with anger and very raw.  Again, I wasn’t sure I had really reached acceptance.

But a few days ago I realized six months have gone by since I first came to the conclusion that there is no god.  And in that six months, a peace has settled over me. As I drift further and further away from religion, the harder I find it to understand the Christian mind-set and how I ever owned it. I’m now at the point where I have to consciously put myself back in that place in order to relate with people still in it.  I also have to remind myself how painful the exit was, because I’m actually quite comfortable with it now. 

There is just one step left.  I can’t say I’ve fully “accepted” my atheism, because I’m still not brave enough to let the world know.  I’ve been through the five stages of grief and now I’m no longer grieving, but I realize that not everyone I know has had the time to do the same.  To let my family and friends know that my faith is dead will only bring it all back up again, and now I’ll have to deal with their grief.  That’s the one thing I’m not ready to accept: Watching my own funeral. 

Hear Ye, Hear Ye!

When one becomes a Christian, it's part and parcel to share that news with the world. We are told we should not hide our light under a bushel but shine it on a hill. 'If you deny Me on earth, I will deny you before My Father in heaven.' (Matthew 10:33) Sharing our newfound faith is an important part of becoming a Christian. Baptism follows, which (varying degrees of significance amongst denominations aside) is a commanded public pronouncement of faith. If one were to become a Christian and keep it to oneself, there would be much speculation on the sincerity of that transformation.

However, when one leaves the Christian faith, it is something to be hidden. It is scandalous. It is in some cases jeopardous, even dangerous. In a Christian society, leaving the faith is most definitely NOT something to shout from the rooftops. While Christians would praise a Muslim for bravely coming out as Christian to his or her family (thereby likely being disowned, if not downright in danger of death), they cannot conceive of a Christian coming out as Muslim, or Jewish, or even Mormon, or -gasp- atheist, and why that person would want to share that terrible news with the world.

So I hide.

More than anything I want to announce to the world that I am atheist. I want to finally get it out in the open, so I don't have to hide who I really am anymore. I don't have any ulterior motive; I'm not out to change you or persecute you. I just want to be free. I want to be known.

But I'm afraid.

I'm afraid of losing friends.

I'm afraid of losing family.

I'm afraid of losing my job.

I'm afraid of losing clients.

I'm afraid of hurting my family.

I'm afraid of humiliating my family.

I'm afraid of putting my children at risk of bullying.

I'm afraid of putting my children at risk of proselytizing.

So I hide.

It is shameful that in a country that was literally founded on people seeking religious freedom, people are not allowed to be free from religion. Religious freedom was not set aside for Christians exclusively. It was intended for all religious people - and non-religious too - whether their beliefs were Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist or Baptist. Or atheist.

But the reality of it is, if you are not Christian - at least here in the Bible Belt - you are at risk. If you leave Christianity, you are an apostate - which is sometimes worse than being Muslim or Hindu (and therefore 'simply a part of your culture'). You may be seen as actually disgracing your family and bringing shame upon their religion... not unlike the Muslim who leaves Islam.

When I first spoke out against my church (still then a Christian), I was reproached for 'giving Christianity a bad name'. Many people felt what I had done was only further non-Christians dislike for Christianity. While I saw their point, I also saw the other side of it. Hiding the faults of churches furthers the non-Christian dislike for Christianity too, perhaps more so.

Apostatizing is perhaps the worst thing a Christian can do. It gives the religion a bad name. It gives non-Christians more ammunition. It lends credence to the possibility that Christianity is not the only answer.

Worse than anything, it waters the seeds of their own doubt that Christians don't want watered.


When I became a Christian (or rather, 'rededicated my life'), I told everyone. I didn't want to hide it from anyone. Even in situations that felt awkward, where I felt I might lose a friend or make myself look stupid, I made my faith known. I did not want to deny Jesus here on earth. When asked, 'So, do you think I'm going to hell?', I awkwardly answered yes. It was of utmost importance that I made sure everyone knew I was a Christian. I may have lost a couple of friends, though if I did, I never knew about it, but there was never any real backlash. I was accepted into a church and a society that congratulates such a decision, and everything was hunky dory. Some people thought I was a little nuts, but it didn't get much worse than that.

Unfortunately, I know for a fact that if now I shared even a fraction of that kind of openness about my non-faith, there WOULD be backlash. I KNOW I would hurt and humiliate my family. I KNOW I'd be unfriended on Facebook (by some friends and even some family members). I SUSPECT many of my other fears would become reality. I doubt I'd lose my job, but it's happened to people before who shared their atheism openly. There is such a stigma to being atheist. The word itself implies hedonism, arrogance, hatred, intolerance, and lawlessness. None of these words describe me, but as soon as I give myself the atheist label, I'll have given myself the rest of the labels too.

A few people know I'm 'not religious', but if I came out and used the A-word, they'd be really surprised, shocked even. So I could publicly call myself agnostic, but that implies a malleability that isn't actually present. It sounds like I just don't know but could be persuaded. It's a safer option, but thanks to the connotations of this word, it wouldn't be true.

All these words and their connotations. They are really unfair.

So I hide.

The truth is, I'm an agnostic atheist. I'm atheist in that I simply don't believe there is a god, any kind of god. I am agnostic, though, because I readily admit there is no way to prove it one way or another. I cannot prove god doesn't exist, and you can't prove he does. I don't believe in any deities (making me atheist as opposed to theist), but I can't unequivocally know that I'm right (making me agnostic as opposed to gnostic).

All it would take for me to stop hiding my light under a bushel is a simple 'Share' on Facebook. This post is written. The truth about me is right here, about to be published. It'll be out there somewhere in Internetland, but no one will be likely to find it. All I need to do is share the link.

But will I?

Dare I?

Regarding Artificial Intelligence... and Religion

Last night, my hubby and I went out for a much needed date, just the two of us, no kids. Gotta thank the parents for babysitting! We went on a 'high school' date, aka, cheap and cheerful, Taco Bell for dinner and a dollar movie. We saw Johnny Depp's new(ish) movie, Transcendence.

I'm one of those people who after watching a sci-fi movie, especially on the big screen, comes out of the theater feeling all, well, sci-fi-y. I'm the same with horror; first time I saw Final Destination, I drove home certain that street lights were flickering ominously and death was prowling around me to get its due. So after leaving a film about artificial intelligence, I began imagining my brain was a computer, with an uploadable consciousness.

We put on one of our current favorite albums for the drive home, Quiet Company's We Are All Where We Belong, a brilliant 'coming-out atheist' album. My mind started to wander...

"I know this is going to sound so cheesy, but in a way, it's like our brains really are computers, and all it takes is a little virus to deprogram the whole thing."

My husband, not finding this as cheesy as I feared, agreed. (Which is good, considering my programming knowledge is very old and probably obsolete, not having worked with data and coding in ten years.  In other words, please excuse any errors that may now follow.)  I started talking about the moment I specifically got 'infected' with the virus; the moment it dawned on me that Jesus Christ might not actually ever be coming back. I remember that exact moment so distinctly. And seeing it from a computing point of view, I started to imagine the so-called virus corrupting my original programming, slowly at first but eventually wiping out the system completely.

The moment I first considered that Jesus was not coming back was like opening a corrupted file. Over the following weeks and months, the belief system I'd held my whole life began to fall apart. It all started to unravel, like a computer virus scanning all my files and wiping them out. After three years, the system was completely wiped, gone, deleted. The faith that had been my operating system had been destroyed.

But a virus isn't right. A virus corrupts. I don't feel like what happened to me corrupted me. "What else could it be then," I asked my techie husband. "A factory reset?"

"More like an upgrade," he responded. Our default setting, he argued, IS religion. We from infancy anthropomorphize everything; it's the only way we understand the world. We tend to think that the world thinks like us, that everything has meaning or reason. Our ancient ancestors saw the sun and believed it had a spirit and a will. We believe bad things happen for a reason. We imagine that the universe works in a humanly rationale way. We want to make sense of why we are here, so we create divine beings to explain our existence, and we rely on this deity for order. Our factory settings kind of are religious.

It takes an upgrade, or perhaps a patch, to rise above that.

This, of course, is highly debatable, depending on what side of the 'program' you fall on. For religious people of all kinds, saying that religion is a factory setting is right! Of course, because God made us that way. God made us to need him. And as we go through life and discover this need for religion, we are pointed to God (or Ra or Allah or Brahma or whomever). To the religious, atheism (or agnosticism) is definitely a virus in the worst sense. A corruption to the system. Something in an email we don't want to open (so we don't open). We stay far away from viruses of doubt to ensure we keep the programs operating as they should, keep the system clean.

But to a non-believer, it's as I said earlier. It's an upgrade. It's taking a system that had faults to begin with and improving upon it. The original OS had some bugs, but there has been new software released that can improve the system's performance. However, you've got to open up that email with the instructions on how to compile the new or changed files yourself to get the patch.

For me, maybe that moment I first realized Jesus may not be coming back like the Bible said he would, wasn't so much a virus that corrupted my system, but a source code modification. How it got there, I'm not sure (was it an executable file, begging the question, IS there a manufacturer someone releasing patches? Are we all actually existing in a virtual reality like The Matrix?), but however it was executed, I'm glad it was. It has definitely improved my system's performance.

Or maybe the better way of saying it is, I've 'transcended'. Making my consciousness now uploadable. Will, Evelyn?

The Origins of Christianity and the Early Church: Recommended Books by Bart Ehrman

You are officially a 'grown-up' when you start preferring news radio over music. Back in Scotland, BBC Radio 4 became my station of choice. I enjoyed Book of the Week and Woman's Hour and the occasional drama series. I liked keeping up with world news through radio. Now that I'm in the US, I am an avid NPR listener, who makes an effort to catch Science Friday, and will sit in the car to finish hearing the discussions on The Takeaway and All Things Considered and the Diane Rehm Show.

Just before Easter this year, I heard an interview on Fresh Air with historian Bart Ehrman on his latest book, How Jesus Became God. It was a fascinating interview, which piqued my interest in early Christian history.

As an evangelical, I always felt a bit hazy on early church history. I tried to learn more about it, about what the earliest Christians were like and believed, but finding useful information seemed difficult. I couldn't find very much beyond legend in Christian media, and secular historians seemed hell-bent on destroying any evidence of truth. Aside from the Acts in the Bible, I didn't really know much at all about early Christianity or how the Bible was put together.

I remember sharing this concern with a pastor friend of mine. I wanted to know how the Bible as we know it today became the canon, and why it happened so late after Jesus' life. I knew it was roughly the fourth century, but I was hazy on who and how. To be honest, it really bothered me that a bunch of Roman Catholics (pre-Martin Luther, which meant to my Protestant mind, a very dubious group of church leaders indeed) seemingly sat down and picked and chose which books "fit" and which ones didn't. I could believe that the Holy Spirit directed them to decide which to choose, but I also could conceive of men "misinterpreting" the Holy Spirit and making mistakes. My pastor friend gave me a book he assured me would help me understand how the books of the Bible were chosen.

I read a chapter of the book and put it down. It made no sense to me, was overly academic and really wasn't assuaging my doubts. From then on, I just sort of allowed myself to forget about it. I allowed it to be one of the few intellectual things I'd simply not pursue and let faith in past knowledge and expertise reign. I wasn't one to do that generally; I like to understand how things work and how things came to be and form my own opinions. But this subject was just too deep - and too treacherous - for me to delve any further into.

The NPR interview with Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, re-sparked my interest. His newest book, the one he was being interview about, explained how the earliest followers of Jesus likely viewed him as the Messiah in an earthly sense - the literal king of the Jews - but upon believing he had risen from the dead, began to believe he was greater than that. This isn't in and of itself entirely foreign to a Christian believer, but what was fascinating is how the early Christians developed their theology of Jesus. From believing he had been adopted as Son by God upon his death and resurrection, to believing he'd been God incarnate in Mary's womb, to believing he was God before time, the belief in who Jesus was grew and morphed and became increasingly more sophisticated as time - and the educational levels of believers - went on. He uses the New Testament as his primary evidence of these theological changes, using the Gospels and Paul's letters to show the chronological changes in these beliefs through the NT books themselves. I'd read the Gospels countless times, but never realized until he pointed them out, how different each Gospel is - and particularly how different the Gospel of John is, the latest Gospel authored.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. After listening to the interview, I went to order the book. However, it was not yet released at that time, so I ordered one of his older books first, Misquoting Jesus. This book turned out to be the perfect starting point for my studies. It explained how the manuscript we call the Bible today came to be - the very question I'd been wanting answered for years. While it didn't go as late as the Council of Nicaea who eventually formed the canon, it did explain where all the earliest manuscripts came from, and how those manuscripts got copied and distributed. What struck me the most was the fact - one I'd never even heard before - that we don't actually have any of the original manuscripts. Not one. All we have are copies, which were likely copies of copies, if not copies of copies of copies. And of all the copies of each book or letter of the New Testament that are available to scholars today, most of them don't even match each other. Some bear only slight mistakes - spelling, a changed word - but some actually have entirely different sections added or subtracted. Since there is no way of knowing which copies were copied from the originals and which were copied from changed copies, we have no way of knowing what the originals even said.

Furthermore, the originals were not even penned until, at the earliest, twenty years after Jesus' death. The earliest letters of Paul were written twenty years later, and the Gospels were written even later than that, the earliest Gospel Mark being written approximately forty years later and John near the end of the first century, about sixty years later. These were things I'd never known before.

Misquoting Jesus was a good precursor to How Jesus Became God. It laid the foundation of textual criticism which gets touched on in HJBG. Both books were incredibly enlightening. I know I'd never have been able to read them as a Christian; they'd have come across as more secular Christian history bashing. Except for one thing. One thing that would have bothered me deeply.

Bart Ehrman was once an evangelical himself. He attended Moody Bible Institute and all.

It was through his study of early church manuscripts and texts that he developed a more "liberal" view of the Bible, seeing it as a very "human" book instead of the inspired word of God. It wasn't this by itself that eventually led to his agnosticism, but it played a large part. Knowing this about his personal history gave these books more credibility to me. He is not a "militant atheist" out to destroy any chance that the Bible might be true. He's a man who once believed in Biblical inerrancy and divine inspiration and who himself once had a "personal relationship with Jesus". He didn't go into the field of textual criticism to debunk Christianity; he went into it to strengthen it.

Bart Ehrman has written several books, and I'd like to get my hands on all of them eventually. The haze of early church beliefs has finally started to lift for me, as I see the Christian religion for what it really was - a fascinating religion that expanded in nuance through time and gained popularity through Roman politics.