Most of the direct, opposing responses I've found to the book are, to be frank, idiotic: they're clearly written by inerrantists whose key point of disagreement is not issue with Ehrman's scholarship but offense at his ideas. One evangelical respondent who makes a respectable, scholarly attempt to address Ehrman's book is Ben Witherington, who published six lengthy blog posts analyzing Jesus, Interrupted's claims. Witherington does point out some important mistakes and overreaching on Ehrman's part (as Ehrman himself states, no book is inerrant) but unfortunately glosses over some of the book's significant points.
The Christian orthodoxy has survived by cleverly altering its doctrine to counter new criticism, and Witherington's doctrine of inerrancy is a slippery one. He acknowledges disagreements in the texts and scribal errors in their transmission, but for Witherington, these are not problematic in asserting the Bible's inerrancy. He argues that each work must be understood in its original context and in the way that its genre would have been interpreted by readers of the day. This is a fair argument to an extent, but when Witherington describes the gospels as "portraits, rather than photographs," he takes his reasoning a step too far.
A portrait can be, in a good many cases, a sufficient portrayal of how someone looks; it may even capture an essence of character that few photographs do. However, no artist or art critic would call any portrait "inerrant" or perfect in its accuracy; a portrait is fundamentally a product of the painter's subjective opinion of its subject's appearance. It'ss one thing to say that the gospels are honest, sufficiently reliable accounts of Jesus' character and ministry, and even that these are in fact the accounts God intended us to have. It is another thing entirely to say that they are the inerrant Word of God (which I find to be a disingenuous phrase, as I'll discuss in a later post.)
The difference is blatant in Witherington's analysis of the genealogies in Matthew and Luke. Witherington writes that Matthew "wants to suggest Jesus is the seventh son of a seventh son of David, namely the perfect descendant of David. In other words, the form of the genealogy reflects not just historical but also theological interests." This is clearly the case, but Witherington's understanding of genre allows such lenient treatment of fact that this and Matthew's other drastic editorial decisions pose no threat to his doctrine.
To be fair, Witherington rightly differentiates himself from fundamentalist scholars who hold an ultra-literal view of inerrancy, and he challenges them on unavoidable differences between the biblical accounts (such as the centurion's words at Jesus' death.) but Witherington's looser interpretation of inerrancy doesn't answer these issues; it merely ducks them. It's a view that's much harder to controvert, but in it, the idea of inerrancy loses its meaning. A claim to unquestionable authority should be held to its own standard.
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