Theopedia

Bart Ehrman

Overview

Bart D. Ehrman (born 1955) is an American New Testament scholar and textual critic, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Raised an evangelical, he moved over the course of his academic training toward the agnosticism he now holds, and argues in his bestselling book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why that the New Testament text and canon were shaped by the theological disputes of the early church rather than transmitted intact from the apostles.12

Life and Ministry

Ehrman attended Moody Bible Institute before completing a B.A. at Wheaton College in 1978, then went on to Princeton Theological Seminary for an M.Div. and a Ph.D. under Bruce M. Metzger.2 He later co-authored a revised edition of Metzger’s standard textbook on the New Testament’s textual transmission.3 The Washington Post profiled the shift in his own convictions during this period, from the inerrantist faith he brought from Moody and Wheaton to the agnosticism he now holds, framing his academic study of the Bible’s textual history as the turning point.2

Theological Contribution

Ehrman’s central claim is that the New Testament text was altered by scribes copying it, sometimes for theological reasons, in the centuries before it was fixed in a stable, printed form; Misquoting Jesus built its readership on the argument that surviving textual variants are extensive enough to undermine confidence in recovering the original wording.1 Michael Kruger groups Ehrman with other modern critics of the New Testament canon who, drawing on Walter Bauer’s thesis that earliest Christianity had no single orthodox center, argue that the canon itself is a theological “invention” of the faction of the early church that eventually prevailed over its rivals, imposed to suppress competing groups rather than received as an inspired collection.4

Kruger, arguing for a stronger view of canonical certainty than Ehrman holds, still grants him one specific point: “We can agree with Ehrman that ‘the canon of the New Testament was ratified by widespread consensus rather than by official proclamation.’”5 His disagreement is with what that consensus shows. Kruger goes on to argue that the church, weighing “the individual merits of each book,” reached “an impressive degree of unity” that should not be dismissed, as he puts it, as “merely an accident of history.”5

Historical Significance

Kruger’s Canon Revisited engages Ehrman’s canon thesis by name twice, in its introduction and again in chapter 8, rather than leaving it unanswered.45 Samuel Parkison pairs Ehrman with the classically-trained scholar Craig Carter as “a tale of two scholars” illustrating a warning about the historical-critical method’s Enlightenment roots: that its naturalistic starting assumptions can, over time, “undermine and even overwhelm one’s personal theology… to loss of faith.”6 Parkison reads Ehrman’s own move from evangelical belief to agnosticism as an instance of that pattern rather than an exception to it.6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), as cited in Samuel G. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), 292. ↩ ↩2

  2. Neely Tucker, “The Book of Bart,” The Washington Post, March 5, 2006. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩

  4. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), “Introduction.” ↩ ↩2

  5. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 8, “Problem Books and Canonical Boundaries.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty,” chap. 2, “The Metaphysics of Divine Beauty,” §”Excursus: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics,” 75-87, quoting V. Philips Long, “‘Competing Histories, Competing Theologies?’ Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Old Testament(’s Readers),” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 377. ↩ ↩2