I decided recently to reread my book Forged: Writing in the Name of God; How the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are  (which, in my view, has one too many titles....).  It was a surprise: I really didn't remember a good bit of the opening part.  And oh boy, I liked it better than I expected (usually when you read your old stuff you just roll your eyes).  One of the theses of the book is that even in the ancient world, people thought that if someone wrote a book claiming to be a famous author (when they were someone else) was seen as a form of lying. I start the book with my own relation to lying and truth.  I'm sure you have your own stories to tell.  Here's part of mine: ****************************** On a bright sunny day in June, when I was fourteen years old, my mom told me that she and my dad were going out to play a round of golf.  I did a quick calculation in my head.  [...]

I am having a ten-week long celebration of our ten-year anniversary, from this past April 18, by reposting all the previous April 18 posts, one a week.  Many of them I'd forgotten about.  This one is about how weird it is to me that people think I'm controversial....  (As usual, I'm a bit tetchy about it!) ****************************** In this post I am going to take a bit of time out to do some self-reflection.  An issue I’ve been puzzling over for some time is the fact that people keep referring to my work as “controversial.”  I hear this all the time.  And truth be told, I’ve always found it bit odd and a disconcerting.  This past week I’ve had two people tell me that they know that I “like to be controversial.”   That’s actually not the case at all.   One person told me that she had seen a TV show where someone had said that they didn’t believe that Jesus existed, and she thought that was right up my alley.  I didn’t bother to tell [...]

This fifth installment of a six-part video thread by Kurt Jaros, an evangelical Christian apologist, considers my views of Scripture back in my hard-core conservative evangelical days and their (possible?) impact on my later decision to leave the faith altogether.  My ears are tingling! ****************************** In this video, I look at the young Bart Ehrman’s theological reflection on the doctrines of inerrancy and the preservation & inspiration of the Biblical text. Did the young Ehrman have a misconception, misunderstanding, or invalid inference pertaining to these doctrines? Image a world in which those doctrinal beliefs were formulated even slightly differently. It may have taken the young Ehrman down a different path.  

In my reflections on my relationship with Bruce Metzger, my mentor through both my Masters and PhD degrees, I come now to a question I sometimes get asked.  Metzger himself was a devout and pious Christian, an ordained Presbyterian minister, and unusually committed to his faith.  When I first met him I was an evangelical; I changed over the years; I eventually left the faith.  How did Metzger respond? After all that I’ve written in these posts, I’m afraid the direct answer will be a bit of a disappointment.  The answer is: I don’t know. Metzger and I never talked about either my faith or his.  He was my teacher and I was his student, and we talked almost exclusively about scholarship:  New Testament studies, the history of earliest Christianity, the textual tradition of the New Testament.  We did not have a pastoral relationship but an academic one.  I don’t know if Metzger ever had a pastoral relationship with any of his students, but I somewhat doubt it.  He was their teacher, not their pastor [...]

After all the tangents and side-tracks, I can return now to my reminiscences of my relationship with Bruce Metzger. Perhaps I should say a few things about his personality, as I perceived and experienced it. I think everyone who knew him would say that he was a true Christian gentleman.  He was respectful of all people, polite to a fault, and cordial.  But he was not someone that anyone became intimate with.  I am sure that I came to be closer to him than any PhD student he supervised in his 40 plus years teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary.  He as much as told me so.  I knew his wife and his two sons (a bit); he invited my family to Christmas dinner; for several weeks I lived with him and his wife in their home.  But there was always a kind of distance to him as well.  He never let down his hair.  The best I can put it is that he was cordial rather than warm and intimate. He was a shy man.  [...]

I was just now looking through some old posts on the blog (there are lots of them!  If you join, you have full access!), and came upon this one from almost exactly four years ago.  It involves a question I get asked a lot by people who have left the faith or find themselves moving in that direction.  It involves how my relationships with others changed as I went from being a very conservative evangelical Christian to becoming an agnostic/atheist. My answer today would be the same....   QUESTION Would you be willing to elaborate on how your changing views affected your relationships with friends and family and how people reacted to your changing perspective? Thanks so much!   RESPONSE As it turns out, in my case, the biggest “problem” for my relationships with family and friends was not so much when I became an agnostic, over twenty years ago now, but when I left the evangelical beliefs I had held as a young adult to become a “liberal” Christian with critical views of the [...]