Jesus: Man, Messenger, Messiah · Introduction

Mark 2:26 and Abiathar: the verse that broke inerrancy for Ehrman

In short

• 1.Jesus (PBUH) in Mark 2:26 says David (PBUH) entered the house of God and ate the showbread "when **Abiathar** was high priest".
• 2.In 1 Samuel 21 the priest is Ahimelech, Abiathar's father.
• 3.Ehrman's Princeton essay argued the difficulty away; his professor's one-line comment was: "Maybe Mark just made a mistake."
• 4.Once one mistake is admitted, the whole inerrancy framework has to be rebuilt.

The claim being examined

For inerrantists, the original text of the Bible contains no historical mistakes; any apparent error must be a misunderstanding on the reader's part.

The Islamic position

Islam's claim about scripture is not that a text is faultless because tradition says so, but that revelation is preserved and verifiable. A doctrine that has to be rescued by strained readings invites exactly the scrutiny Q 2:79 raises.

Analysis

Ehrman describes writing a long paper reconciling Mark 2:26 with 1 Samuel 21, arguing that the Greek only means the episode sits in the part of scripture where Abiathar looms large. The simpler reading is that the writer of Mark misremembered. His point is not that Mark is worthless, but that this is a human book with human features — which is what textual criticism (comparing old copies to recover the earliest wording) assumes, and what inerrancy (the belief that scripture contains no error at all) denies. Notably, Matthew and Luke both drop the priest's name when they retell the episode.

From the Qur'an

From the Bible

Sources

More in Introduction

• The question the book actually asks
• Who Bart Ehrman is, and why that matters