* Bart Ehrman's Personal Ascent from Faith to Reality ~ The Bible is Not Inspired by God

"Although Ehrman has a strong background in Evangelical Christianity, having attending both Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College (B.A., 1978), his personal beliefs have shifted over time. Ehrman now considers himself an agnostic."

Author of nineteen books, Bart D. Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and an expert on early Christianity. He received his Ph.D and M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary where he studied under Bruce Metzger. He currently serves as the chairperson of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was the President of the Southeast Region of the Society of Biblical Literature, and worked closely as an editor on a number of the Society's publications. Currently, he co-edits the series New Testament Tools and Studies.


Bart D. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has been teaching for over 15 years. He completed his undergraduate work at Wheaton College and received his Masters of Divinity and Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. Prior to taking his position at UNC, Professor Ehrman taught at Rutgers University.

"In his Introduction (pp. 1-15) to his book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, Ehrman explains why the subject of the text of the New Testament is one that has radically affected him both emotionally and intellectually. He was brought up in a 'churchgoing but not particularly religious' family (p. 1) but in teenage years felt a kind of loneliness (which he now thinks was just what all teenagers feel). After becoming involved in a Campus Life Youth for Christ club he had a 'born-again' experience aged 15 and some time after that was encouraged to attend the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, which he did in 1973. This institution held to biblical inerrancy and that the words of the autograph were inspired, but in an early class he encountered the fact that we do not possess the autographs, only 'error-ridden copies of the autographs' (p. 5). This got him interested in trying to learn about textual criticism. By the end of his three-year diploma at Moody he wanted to become '... an evangelical "voice" in secular circles, by getting degrees that would allow me to teach in secular settings while retaining my evangelical commitments' (pp. 5-6). He went to Wheaton College, majoring in English and learning Greek, and there he experienced some doubts. After two years he went to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studied with Bruce Metzger. He writes, 'A turning point came in my second semester' (p. 8), during a course on Mark when he had written a paper trying to justify the name 'Abiathar' in Mark 2:26 and his professor, Cullen Story, wrote thereon 'Maybe Mark just made a mistake'. Once Ehrman had concluded that he did, 'the floodgates opened' to admitting other problems in scripture (p. 9) and then to having a radical rethink of his understanding of the Bible. He now writes a book which he believes is the first of its kind: a book 'for people who know nothing about textual criticism' (p. 15)."

Excerpts from Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why:

The more I studied the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, the more I realized just how radically the text had been altered over the years at the hands of scribes, who were not only conserving scripture but also changing it. (p. 207)

When I was a student just beginning to think about those fifteen centuries of copying and the vicissitudes of the text, I kept reverting to the fact that whatever else we may say about the Christian scribes—whether of the early centuries or of the Middle Ages—we have to admit that in addition to copying scripture, they were changing scripture. Sometimes they didn't mean to—they were simply tired, or inattentive, or, on occasion, inept. At other times, though, they did mean to make changes, as when they wanted the text to emphasize precisely what they themselves believed, for example about the nature of Christ, or about the role of women in the church, or about the wicked character of their Jewish opponents. This conviction that scribes had changed scripture became an increasing certitude for me as I studied the text more and more. (p. 210)

As I realized already in graduate school, even if God had inspired the original words, we don't have the original words. So the doctrine of inspiration was in a sense irrelevant to the Bible as we have it, since the words God reputedly inspired had been changed and, in some cases, lost. (p. 211)

... the only reason (I came to think) for God to inspire the Bible would be so that his people would have his actual words; but if he really wanted people to have his actual words, surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he had miraculously inspired them in the first place. Given the circumstance that he didn't preserve the words, the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn't gone to the trouble of inspiring them. (p. 211)

Ehrman's Official Website