Ehrman writes the following as a teaser to his paid blog site. But there's enough here to think about the issue:
In previous posts, in answer to the question of whether I think that Jesus was a great moral teacher, I have said that I think the answer is Yes, but that there is a very serious caveat. Jesus’ ethical teaching is based on a view of the world that most of us today no longer hold. Jesus’ ethical teaching – just as all of his teaching – is deeply rooted in a form of Jewish apocalyptic thought that can be dated and localized to his time and place. Jesus thought that the culmination of the history of God’s people, Israel, was soon to come, that the climax of all human history was at hand, that God was soon to intervene in the course of history to overthrow the powers of evil that were in control of this world to bring in his good kingdom, here on earth. People were to live ethically in order to inherit that kingdom; and in fact, they were to begin to model the ethics of that kingdom in the here and now, so that when the cosmic judge of the earth came froam heaven, they would be saved from the wrath of God that would strike the planet before the true people of God were exalted and made rulers of the earth.
So, the short story is that I do not subscribe to this apocalyptic view myself (though I once did, in its modernized form). I do not think there are actual cosmic forces in the world – the Devil, demons, cosmic powers of sin, and death, other principalities and powers that are wreaking havoc here. I don’t think that Jesus was right about when the end was going to come (during his disciples’ lifetime) or how it was to come (with the appearance of the Son of Man from heaven). I think that the entire framework for Jesus’ teaching was a form of Jewish mythology distinctive of Jewish thinkers in Jesus’ day, and that our modern world (again, except for modernized fundamentalist forms of apocalyptic thought) has a different way of looking at history, the powers who make things happen in this world, natural forces (that lead, for example, to disaster and devastation), and so on.
If Jesus’ basic world view (on which his ethics were built) does not translate into our modern world, does that mean that his ethical teaching, built on and rooted in that world view, also cannot be taken over into our modern world? If the ethics was rooted in a system we don’t subscribe to, don’t we need to abandon not only the underlying foundation but also the structure built on it?
Ehrman admits he doesn't know. The tropological reading being entirely suggestive of an eschatological reality again, like so many things, requires we agree on the terms and conditions of what eschatology means. Ehrman uses the term "demythologizing Jesus' ethics" - a nod to Rudolf Bultmann, but he clearly is not thinking of eschatology in the sense that Bultmann does, namely an in-this-world experience that brings about existential crisis. For Ehrman, the literalist reality of a Jesus who thinks God is about to break into history as a supernatural event would be what he has in mind. As an historian this makes sense. To consider an ethical theory in a way other than one that has a literalist reality seems to grant too much to latter-day efforts by theologians to read back into Jesus' day an ethical reality that was perhaps too sophisticated to address the challenges of the kind of world he inhabited. When one thinks about Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, we may have the sense that these brilliant thinkers were simply trying to recover the biblical observations and insights of Jesus' time by channeling them through the category of theirs. I feel this as well. I could never entirely read Bultmann without a sense that he (and Tillich) thought that existentialism was something that always was. That is, wherever opportunity arose, Tillich could pick apart the pre-Socratics to find existentialism. Whether it is or is not there, perhaps the real problem was that the last century, so categorized by existentialist thought was not itself "existentialist," but given the realities of two world wars, an opportunity to "think existentially" came about. I would like to think this, and in doing so, this allows us to avoid the charge that modern ethicists are projecting a worldview on the past that wasn't there. I think this is what we can find in an affirmative reading of the existentialists like Bultmann who interpreted eschatology in an altogether unique way. And I think many theologians of our day have found traction in the idea that Jesus' eschatology was not about ushering in an "otherworld" but about bringing the kingdom to this world. Was this purely through political and ethical means. I don't think so. The idea remains how we approach scripture and how we want to read it. Enter in the very real situation of four different gospels with potentially four different communities and the way they thought of Jesus and there is a lot of opportunity for difference, a lot of opportunity to ask what we mean when we turn "Jesus' ethics" into the thought of an individual, rather than a community, the most severe of which comes in the gospel of John.
Anyway, it is a question worth thinking about and recovering. Certainly, the fact that we continue as the community of Christ to find his ideas resonating with us is reason enough.
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