minusRusty is a Faith & Reason regular who likes to stick a pin in conventional views fairly often. So he's picked an author for the Book Club who's well matched to his inquisitive ways.

Rusty, who says he has more than a dozen English versions of the Bible, is trying to decide which one to read all the way through. Here's his review of Bart Ehrman's latest controversial book, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) from HarperOne.

Liar, lunatic, Lord, or legend?

Bart Ehrman, scholar and New Testament textual critic from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, presents an alternative to C. S. Lewis' famous trilemma regarding Jesus' divinity in his book.

(Note here if you don't have Lewis's Mere Christianity handy. Lewis explained in a radio interview...

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic; on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg; or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God...)

More than addressing Lewis, says Rusty, Ehrman...

... explains the need to let each NT author and book speak for itself and its own concerns, and to read duplicate accounts in parallel (or horizontally, as Ehrman would say). If we don't, he says, we are in danger of misreading each book's message -- and missing that sometimes those messages conflict.

Ehrman believes that Jesus existed. But he also says, in part, that legends have built up around him, and that some of these legends can be picked up in the New Testament itself. For example, Why does Mark not contain a genealogy, but Matthew and Luke do?

Jesus, Interrupted has a lot of information in it that has been known to scholars for a long time, but is less well known by the general public. This information should be generally known, even if one doesn't agree with the implications.

But what does this mean for me, as an atheist? Well, since I don't read Greek, what English version of the Bible should I read where each New Testament author and book can speak for itself?

Now, it's your turn. Comment here on Ehrman or Rusty's views, raise your own questions about Jesus, or take a moment to submit your own book review (guidelines). Remember -- fiction, non-fiction, biography, history, novels... we're looking for reviews the books that made you think -- and why.