Bart D. Ehrman

On October 5, 1955, Ehrman was born in Lawrence, Kansas, and subsequently grew up there before attending Lawrence High School, where he was on the state champion debate team in 1973. He began studying the Bible, biblical theology, and biblical languages at Moody Bible Institute,^[2] where he earned the school's three-year diploma in 1976.^[3] He earned his BA from Wheaton College in Illinois in 1978. He later earned an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1981 and a PhD in 1985, where he studied textual criticism of the Bible, development of the New Testament canon and New Testament apocrypha under Bruce Metzger. Both the baccalaureate and doctorate were conferred magna cum laude.^{[4][failed verification]}

Ehrman was raised in the Episcopal Church; as a teenager, he became a born-again evangelical.^[2][5][6] In Misquoting Jesus, he recounts being certain in his youthful enthusiasm that God had inspired the wording of the Bible and protected its texts from all error.^[2][5] His desire to understand the original words of the Bible led him to study ancient languages, particularly Koine Greek, and textual criticism. During such studies at Princeton, however, he became convinced that there were contradictions and discrepancies in the biblical manuscripts that could not be harmonized or reconciled:^[2]

I did my very best to hold on to my faith that the Bible was the inspired word of God with no mistakes and that lasted for about two years [...] I realized that at the time we had over 5,000 manuscripts of the New Testament, and no two of them are exactly alike. The scribes were changing them, sometimes in big ways, but lots of times in little ways. And it finally occurred to me that if I really thought that God had inspired this text [...] If he went to the trouble of inspiring the text, why didn't he go to the trouble of preserving the text? Why did he allow scribes to change it?^[2]

In the preface to his 2020 book Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife, Ehrman said that he had been scared of going to Hell since he was a child and, when he began to encounter some doubts about his Christian beliefs at college, he became panicked that he might die before he had found the right beliefs, and be sent to Hell.^[7]

He subsequently turned into a liberal Christian, remaining in the Episcopal Church for 15 years, but later became an agnostic atheist after struggling with the philosophical problems of evil and suffering.^[2][3][8]

Ehrman has written widely on issues of the New Testament and early Christianity at both an academic and popular level, much of it based on textual criticism of the New Testament. His thirty books include three college textbooks and six New York Times bestsellers: Misquoting Jesus,^[9] Jesus, Interrupted,^[10] God's Problem,^[11] Forged,^[12][13] How Jesus Became God,^[14] and The Triumph of Christianity.^[15] More than two million copies of his books have been sold, and his books have been translated into 27 languages.^[16]

In Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, Ehrman agrees with Albert Schweitzer's thesis that Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic preacher and that his main message was that the end times were near, that God would shortly intervene to overthrow evil and establish his rule on Earth, and that Jesus and his disciples all believed these end time events would occur in their lifetimes.^[17]

In Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code, Ehrman expands on his list of ten historical and factual inaccuracies in Dan Brown's novel, previously incorporated in Dan Burstein's Secrets of the Code.^[18]

In Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman outlines the development of New Testament manuscripts and the process and cause of manuscript errors in the New Testament.^[19][20]

In Jesus, Interrupted, he describes the progress scholars have made in understanding the Bible over the past two hundred years and the results of their study, which are often unknown among the population at large. He highlights the diversity of views found in the New Testament, the existence of forged books in the New Testament which were written in the names of the apostles by Christian writers who lived decades later, and his belief that Christian doctrines such as the suffering Messiah, the divinity of Jesus, and the Trinity were later inventions.^[21][22] To date, he has changed his mind on several issues, most notably the divinity of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels.^[23][24] This view of the divinity doctrine being added later has been disputed following the discovery of the Megiddo Church, where a mosaic dated to 230 AD includes a inscription relating to the divinity of Jesus.^[25]

In Forged, Ehrman posits that some New Testament books are literary forgeries and shows how widely forgery was practiced by early Christian writers—and how it was condemned in the ancient world as fraudulent and illicit.^[26] His scholarly book, Forgery and Counterforgery, is an advanced look at the practice of forgery in the New Testament and early Christian literature. It makes a case for considering falsely attributed or pseudepigraphic books in the New Testament and early Christian literature "forgery", looks at why certain New Testament and early Christian works are considered forged, and describes the broader phenomenon of pseudepigraphy in the Greco-Roman world.^[27]

In 2012, Ehrman published Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, defending the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth in contrast to the mythicist theory that Jesus is an entirely fictitious being.^[28]

The 2014 release of How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee examines the historical Jesus, who according to Ehrman neither thought of himself as God nor claimed to be God, and proffers how he came to be thought of as the incarnation of God himself.^[29]

In Jesus Before the Gospels, he examines the early Christian oral tradition and its role in shaping the stories about Jesus that are encountered in the New Testament.^[30]

The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World notes that from the diversity of Christianity "throughout the first four Christian centuries," eventually only one form of Christianity, Nicene Christianity, became dominant under the rule of the Roman Emperor Constantine and his successors.^[31]

Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife examines the historical development of the concepts of the afterlife throughout Greek, Jewish, and early Christian cultures, and how they eventually converged into the concepts of Heaven and Hell recognized by modern Christians.^[32]

Ehrman has released nine courses, consisting of 12 or 24 thirty-minute lectures through The Great Courses.^[33]

Ehrman has been the recipient of the 2009 J. W. Pope "Spirit of Inquiry" Teaching Award, the 1993 UNC Undergraduate Student Teaching Award, the 1994 Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement, and the Bowman and Gordon Gray Award for excellence in teaching.^[4]

Daniel Wallace has praised Ehrman as "one of North America's leading textual critics" and describes him as "one of the most brilliant and creative textual critics I have ever known". Wallace argues, however, that in Misquoting Jesus Ehrman sometimes "overstates his case by assuming that his view is certainly correct". For example, Wallace asserts that Ehrman himself acknowledges the vast majority of textual variants are minor, but his popular writing and speaking sometimes makes the sheer number of them appear to be a major problem for getting to the original New Testament text.^[34]

Ehrman's The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings is widely used at American colleges and universities.^[35][36] The textbook holds to a traditional interpretation of the Gospel of Thomas in the context of second-century Christian Gnosticism, a view that has been criticized by Elaine Pagels.^[37]

Alan Kirk found Ehrman's writing in Jesus Before the Gospels to cite memory research selectively, neglecting the fact that John Bartlett's experiment discovered that stories quickly took on a stable, 'schematic' form rather quickly. Ehrman also overemphasizes individual transmission instead of community, makes a 'lethal oversight' where Jan Vansina, whom he quoted as evidence for corruption in the Jesus tradition, changed his mind, arguing that information was conveyed through a community that placed controls, rather than through chains of transmission easily subject to change. Kirk does sympathize with Ehrman that appealing to memory cannot automatically guarantee historicity.^[38]

Evangelical scholars Andreas J. Köstenberger, Darrell L. Bock, and Josh D. Chatraw have disputed Ehrman's depiction of scholarly consensus, saying: "It is only by defining scholarship on his own terms and by excluding scholars who disagree with him that Ehrman is able to imply that he is supported by all other scholarship,"^[39] but Michael R. Licona, scholar and Christian apologist, notes that "his positions are those largely embraced by mainstream skeptical scholarship."^[36]

Gary Kamiya states in Salon that "Ehrman's scholarly standing did not soothe the evangelical Christians who were outraged by Misquoting Jesus. Angered by what they took to be the book's subversive import, they attacked it as exaggerated, unfair and lacking a devotional tone. No fewer than three books were published in response to Ehrman's tome".^[40] In 2014, Zondervan published How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus' Divine Nature: A Response to Bart D. Ehrman as a planned companion volume to Ehrman's How Jesus Became God. The contributing authors—including Michael F. Bird, Craig A. Evans, and Simon Gathercole—present Ehrman as "prone to profound confusion, botched readings, and scholarly fictions."^[41] Bird writes, "For conservative Christians, Ehrman is a bit of a bogeyman, the Prof. Moriarty of biblical studies, constantly pressing an attack on their long-held beliefs about God, Jesus, and the Bible.... For secularists, the emerging generation of 'nones' (who claim no religion, even if they are not committed to atheism or agnosticism), Ehrman is a godsend."^[42] Charles Gieschen, whose work Ehrman cited, has objected to the latter's usage of his work in How Jesus Became God, instead arguing for a Christology where Jesus is identified with the God of Israel.^[43]

Ehrman has participated in several debates on the topic of the historical reliability of the Gospels. This includes a 2014 debate with Protestant apologist^[44] James White and a 2022 debate with Roman Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin.^[45]

Ehrman has been married twice and has two children from his first marriage. He is married to Sarah Beckwith, a professor of medieval literature at Duke University and an Episcopalian.^[46] With the exception of sports broadcasting, Ehrman does not watch television, but reportedly does watch a classic Criterion Collection film with Beckwith on a weekly basis.^[47]

• Price, Robert M. (2018), Bart Ehrman Interpreted: How One Radical New Testament Scholar Understands Another, Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA), ISBN 978-1634311588, OCLC 1020301095
• Kinlaw, Robert; Stasio, Frank (March 5, 2018). "The Sunday School Teacher Turned Skeptic: Meet Bart Ehrman" (pod). State of Things. WUNC (NPR).

 

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