Bart’s Biography Archives - The Bart Ehrman Blog

My First Scholarly Encounter with the Canon of the New Testament

So: I've started to work on my next book (or books, depending on how things go), on how we got the canon of the New Testament. Why these 27 books? Why not others? Who decided? When? On what grounds? etc. I started thinking about this issue already as an 18-year-old in Bible college, but at that point had the traditional theological answers for it that are still being published regularly by evangelical scholars as if they are "news" (!). We saw it as a divinely directed event with an inevitable outcome in which the inspired books were the ones that were included simply because they were the ones recognized as being inspired by God. When I went to Princeton Seminary, for my Masters and then PhD, it was primarily to work with Bruce Metzger, because he was the world leading expert on ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. He was also the foremost scholar of the day on the formation of the canon of Scripture (and published the still authoritative account of it, over [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-12T00:23:19-04:00September 10th, 2025|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels|

My Next Book: Creating the Bible — How We Got the Canon of the New Testament

Now that my book Love Thy Stranger is done, in press, being prepared for publication (March 24! You can preorder it with a price guarantee from Amazon already), and, as far as I am concerned with, over and done with, I have moved on to the next project, or projects. I THINK it will be two -- a trade book for general audiences and an academic book for scholars, both on how we got the canon of the New Testament. My tentative title, which will no doubt be changed roughly 79 times before we come up with the final one, is CREATING THE BIBLE: How We Got the Twenty-Seven Books of Christian Scripture. Three years ago or so I wrote up a prospectus for my publisher, Simon & Schuster, and shared it with blog readers. I thought it would be a good time now to put it up again along with a couple of relevant posts just to get the juices starting to flow (before I return in a few days to the "New Testament in a Nutshell Series"!). [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-12T00:22:04-04:00September 7th, 2025|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Public Forum|

Losing Your Religion: Today and in Antiquity

Many of us have agonized over leaving the faith we held dear and clung on to for long periods of our life. Most of us have never thought about what it would have been like for ancient peoples to leave *their* religions, not to move to agnosticism or atheism, but because a *different* religion was taking over. That is part of what I address in my book The Triumph of Christianity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017). I have been providing posts summarizing the issues I address in my various popular books. I'll continue to do that now with Triumph. This is how I begin the book, not in a place one might expect! But with one of the great poets of doubt in modernity... ****************************** In my junior year of college I took a course in English literature that made me understand for the first time how painful it can be to question your faith. The course introduced me to poets of the nineteenth century who were struggling with religion. Even though I was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:08:33-04:00August 22nd, 2024|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

How I Almost Published “Lost in Transmission”
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How I Almost Published “Lost in Transmission”

Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions

How I Almost Published “Lost in Transmission”

I can't end my discussion of my book Misquoting Jesus without telling one of my favorite publishing stories. OK ... without *repeating* it. I've given it on the blog before, but it's been some years. It was originally a response to a question about how trade books get their titles, and my explanation that "Misquoting Jesus" was NOT the title I wanted. ****************************** QUESTION: Dr, Ehrman, can you explain a little how you go about choosing a title for your trade books? Is it a collaborative effort between you and your agent or publisher? Can it be a difficult process where the title can change as the book progresses? And if so,, can you give just a couple examples when you had decided on a title (could you name the original title ) and changed the title to the book that finally appeared at our local book store ? RESPONSE: In earlier posts I discussed the strategies behind giving a title to a scholarly book. When it comes to trade books, written for popular [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:08:32-04:00August 13th, 2024|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions|

Misquoting Jesus and My Fall From Fundamentalism

Is the Bible the inerrant Word of God or a very human book with all the problems that normally entails? For me, realizing that we don’t have the Bible in its original form was important to my thinking as I moved away believing the Bible had come straight to us from God. I’ve been talking about all this as background to my book Misquoting Jesus (Harper, 2005). In the following excerpt I begin to explain the wide-ranging implications of my new way for understanding the New Testament. My previous post ended with my realization, as stated in my book, that “there are more variations in the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament.” Lots and lots of conservative Christian scholars have maligned me putting it this way, even though they know it’s true. They just think it’s too radical. Little do they know (until I inform them) that the phrase came to me from the textual scholar they adore above all others, my mentor Bruce Metzger, who used to say it all [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:08:32-04:00August 11th, 2024|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts|

How Scholarship Changed My Life

I continue now with the backstory of why I wrote my book Misquoting Jesus; up to this point I’ve explained how I became an evangelical Christian and, after high school, made a beeline for Moody Bible Institute and became interested in understanding how we got the New Testament – not in the original writings, which we no longer have, but only in later copies which have lots of mistakes in them. I continue now from there, with another excerpt the Introduction of my book Misquoting Jesus (Harper, 2005) ****************************** At the end of my three years at Moody (it was a three-year diploma) I had done well in my courses and was more serious than ever about becoming a Christian scholar. My idea at the time was that there were plenty of highly educated scholars among the evangelical Christians, but there were not many evangelicals among the (secular) highly educated scholars. And so I wanted to become an evangelical “voice,” as it were, in secular circles, by getting degrees that would allow me to teach [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:08:32-04:00August 10th, 2024|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels|

Why I Wrote Misquoting Jesus

My book Misquoting Jesus was the biggest surprise of my career. No one thought (as colleague scholars frequently told me, somewhat emphatically, in advance) that a book like this would go *anywhere*. A discussion of changes made by scribes while copying the manuscripts of the New Testament? What? Even New Testament experts were and are by and large simply uninterested in the field, considering it a technical, detailed, and incredibly dull enterprise. My friends in graduate school thought i was an odd-duck for wanting even to study the matter, let alone devote a lot of my scholarship to it. And to think about writing a book for non-scholars about it? Yikes. I've been devoting posts to explaining the various books I've written, and so now it's time to hit this one. This will take will take three posts, all excerpted from the Introduction to the book (Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Harper, 2005). In this opening bit I give the autobiographical background to why I originally got [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:08:32-04:00August 8th, 2024|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

A Hugely Memorable Moment: When I Saw Codex Sinaiticus

In my last post I began to relate an anecdote about a traveling adventure I had several years ago, when giving lectures for a UNC trip to Egypt and Jordan with a stop at the famed St. Catherine’s monastery in the southern part of the Sinai peninsula, the place where Tischendorf had discovered the biblical manuscript Codex Sinaiticus in the mid 19th century, and where a fire at the monastery in the 1970s had uncovered a hidden room found to contain manuscripts, including the pages from the Old Testament of the Codex Sinaiticus that Tischendorf had not come away with from the monastery when he took the bulk of the manuscript with him back to Russian. (Now THAT'S a long sentence!) For me, one of the highlights of this trip was to be a visit to the monastery, a place that I had wanted to see for years. It is located in a completely barren location in the wilderness and is the one and only thing to see in the entire region. It’s not the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:04:27-04:00September 7th, 2023|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts|

When I Got Seriously Interested in Memory (at least insofar as I remember)

(Recall: this post came from the past, when I was working on my book about Jesus and Memory, badly titled Jesus Before the Gospels. I had forgotten about the post till just now!) As I indicated in my previous post, I have long been interested in memory for both personal and professional reasons. On the personal level, I have known people very close to me who have experienced serious memory problems, for example through strokes. Depending on what part of the brain is affected, different memory functions are damaged. For example, someone may remember perfectly well what happened in an event 20 years ago, but forget a conversation they just had. I have often wondered why and how that is.. And then there was my own memory. For some things I have a terrific memory. And for lots of things I have an absolutely terrible memory. I especially have a terrible “episodic” memory (as psychologists call it), a memory for things that happen in your life and you experience. Let me give an example. About [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:23-04:00May 4th, 2023|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Memory Studies|

My Best Best-Selling Fluke

A couple of weeks ago I published a post about how an author writes a bestseller (she doesn't! It becomes one or not for reasons other than the author's intent or writing...) I remembered I had posted something on the topic years ago, based on a blog member's question about my personal best-selling book, Misquoting Jesus, and why it did so well. In some ways it's a real puzzle. The book is about Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. HUH??? A bestselling book? What??? (That, at least, is what all my friends said!) But the answer relates to my previous post. Here is the Q and then the A. QUESTION: In your previous answer to me you indicated that what makes a bestseller, in the end of the day, is massive media attention. My question now is what sparks this attention. In other words, why, out of all your books, did Misquoting Jesus receive a great attention from the media? RESPONSE: Ha! It’s a great question. I’ll start by saying that if there were [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:07-04:00April 26th, 2023|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions|

Is Suffering a “Problem” for Believers?

This past week I had a long talk with one of my bright undergraduates, a first-year student who had been raised in a Christian context but had come to have serious doubts driven in large part by the difficulty she had understanding how there could be suffering in a world controlled by an all-knowing and all-powerful God. I naturally resonated with the question, since this is why I myself left the Christian faith. I get asked about that transition a lot, and it’s been five or six years since I’ve discussed it at any length on the blog. So I thought I might return to it. The one and only time I”ve talked about it at length is in my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer (Oxford University Press, 2008). Here is how I discuss it there, slightly edited. (This will take several posts) ******************************* I think I know when suffering started to become a “problem” for me. It was while I was still [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:01:35-04:00February 22nd, 2023|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Am I About To Become Muslim?

I often get asked about the Qur'an (on which I have zero expertise) and my views of Islam (which I admire as one of the great religions of the world with lots of problems involving how it sometimes gets interpreted and used, just like every other great religion of the world). I was just thinking about that this morning and remembered a post I did a long time ago answering a question a reader had raised with me. Is it true I am about to convert to Islam? Well, it hasn't happened yet, but I thought I would be worthwhile repeating the post: READER COMMENT: I received a message on Facebook a couple of weeks ago from a person who has been proselytizing to me about the Muslim faith. This has happened a few times with others on your FB page. I guess that's what they do. Anyway, the other day I asked him if he was on your blog. He responded with a yes. Then he said that we (the members) were going [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:01:03-04:00February 4th, 2023|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions|

How To Leave the Faith and Not Destroy the Family: Thanksgiving Reflection 2022

My beloved mom died last week. She lived a long and good life; she brought a lot of good into the world and made many people very happy; and she died a good death – peaceful, in comfort, in the presence of family. How good can it get? There are many things I have long been thankful for about my mom. I would like to reflect on one of them here. Many years ago, when I left the Christian faith that my mom held so dear – a faith that meant almost everything to her – it caused her a great deal of pain. But she did not allow our stark differences to destroy our relationship. We continued to love and honor each other even though we were deeply at odds on issues that both of us considered among the most important in our lives. My mom was not raised in a religious household. She grew up in the small town of Burlington Kansas and her parents were not church people. When she was in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:18-04:00November 23rd, 2022|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Religion and the Wrecking Ball of Truth

In my last post I began to discuss the importance of "truth" to conservative evangelical Christianity, through a bit of autobiography. You don't need to have read that post for this one, so I begin here with the final paragraph that I left off with there. This is from my book Forged. ****************************** One of the ironies of modern religion is that the absolute commitment to truth in some forms of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity, and the concomitant view that truth is objective and can be verified by any impartial observer, has led many faithful souls to follow the truth wherever it leads, but where it leads is often away from evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity. That is to say, if you can, in theory, verify the “objective” truth of religion, and then it turns out that the religion being examined is verifiably wrong, where does that leave you? For many one-time evangelical Christians it leaves them in the wilderness outside the evangelical camp, but with an unrepentant view of truth. Objective truth, to paraphrase the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:18-04:00November 22nd, 2022|Bart’s Biography, Catholic Epistles|

Me and the “Truth”: A Bit of Autobiography

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. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:18-04:00November 20th, 2022|Bart’s Biography|

Trying to Make Scholarship Interesting

I've long been interested in thinking about how to make boring subjects interesting. I've become especially attuned to the issue recently as I've begun to read a lot more scholarship in fields completely unrelated to mine. Some scholars have a gift in being able to reach low level mortals like me. My own field is not nearly as complicated as the hard sciences (always hard for me, at least!) but every field has its technicalities and jargon and wide range of not-widely-shared assumptions, perspectives, and history of investigation. And so I was struck when I ran across this post from some years ago, and realized that it's still the sort of thing I think about roughly every day. ****************************** The difficulty in presenting serious scholarship to a lay audience is how to make something that can be very dry and technical and detailed and, well, boring to most human beings actually interesting and lively and thought provoking. It is obviously quite easy to make something interesting dull. University professors are unusually skilled at doing that. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:04-04:00November 2nd, 2022|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Publishing in Academic Journals

The most obvious activity that professional scholars engage in is research, and the most obvious way research becomes known to a wider public is through publication. In some fields of inquiry (most of the sciences), the academic journal is the principal area of significant publication. In other fields (most of the humanities), academic books matter even more. But even in the humanities scholar typically publish in both venues. Books take a lot longer to write, but articles play an extremely important role both in disseminating knowledge – the results of research – and in providing grounds for a scholar’s academic tenure and promotion. The articles that scholars write – when they are writing as research scholars – are not the sort of thing that you would find in Time Magazine or Newsweek. Every field has its own set of academic, peer-reviewed journals (there are a large number in biblical studies in the U.S. and Europe); and every scholar who is active in his or her field or research publishes in them. These are not journals [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:59:48-04:00October 15th, 2022|Bart’s Biography, Teaching Christianity|

Getting the PhD in New Testament Studies

I continue here my series from long ago about what it's like to be a research scholar at a research university. In this post I described what it takes to get the qualifications in the first place. (The only thing I would probably change today, ten years after writing this post, is that university positions in the humanities are so difficult to find these days that you REALLY REALLY need to love doing the graduate work, because in many cases it will not lead to a career option. Still... it *does* happen!), Here's how MY PhD in New Testament Studies happened. ****************************** I sometimes get asked what it takes to become a professional scholar in the field of New Testament/Early Christian studies. The answer, in short, is the same as for any academic discipline. It takes years of intense training. My own training in the field of New Testament studies was nothing at all unusual, but rather was fairly typical for someone in the field. What is unusual is that I knew that I wanted [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:59:48-04:00October 13th, 2022|Bart’s Biography, Teaching Christianity|

How Serendipity Changed My Life: The Apostolic Fathers

I decided that it might be fun to talk about how serendipity completely shaped my academic career, maybe doing a post now and then on the topic. I seem to have had more than my share of fortuitous moments that have changed my life in ways I never would have expected. When I just now sat down to do a first post on it, I suddenly seemed to remember I did that once. And lo and behold, I did! Over ten years ago. So I'll start with this one and toss a new one in every now and then. Here's what I said before: ****************************** It seems that much that has happened in my professional life has been because of serendipity. Back when I was a believer, we called it Providence. (!) It’s how I got my first job at Rutgers in 1984; how I got my current position at UNC in 1988; how I got asked to write something other than a technical study involving the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:59:47-04:00October 12th, 2022|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Proto-Orthodox Writers|

A Funny Story about the Rapture

In my forthcoming book on Revelation (Title: Armaggedon: What the Bible Really Says About the End; to be published on March 21), I discuss how evangelical Christians in the 19th century came up with the idea of a "rapture" -- that Jesus was soon to return to heaven to take true believers out of it before the horrible seven-year "tribulation" began. Here is a funny story about belief in the rapture from my younger days. At the time I was still a churchgoing Christian. The church I was attending was evangelical, but I was moving away from a conservative theology and its strict, literal interpretation of the Bible. I was becoming socially quite liberal, and was starting to take a more liberal view of the Bible. I still thought that in *some* sense it was the Word of God, but I did not think that it was infallible or true in every way. I had already come to see that parts of it contradicted one another, that there were historical implausibilities, and mistakes of various kinds. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:59:34-04:00September 13th, 2022|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

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