Bart’s Biography Archives - Page 7 of 11 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

How I Moved into Trade Publishing

I have been explaining that I started to write books for a broader audience not because that was some kind of goal in my life – just the opposite! – but because I came to think it would be a good thing to try to communicate scholarship on the New Testament to 19-20 year olds in a college-level textbook. A couple of readers have commented that when my former classmates from Moody have indicated that I wanted (and still want) to write books to become famous, they were not referring to my textbooks but to my trade books for a general (adult) audience. That’s exactly right – that is indeed what they were referring to. The reason I’ve been talking about my first textbook is that this was the beginning of my quest to reach out to a broader swath of people. Here in this post I’ll get to my trade books. After I wrote my first textbook (I’ve now written three, and compiled three anthologies of ancient texts, in good translations, with brief introductions, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:14-04:00May 19th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On Writing for A College Audience

I have been dealing with some of the criticisms that classmates from my college days at Moody Bible Institute have leveled against me. The reason this thread started is that I had decided to say a few words about my Moody experience here on the blog. I didn’t really finish that, but word got out among my former peers (I’m on a listserv that some of them hang out on) and several people made remarks about it. I’m not sure they knew I was reading their comments. (!) One comment was that I was in danger of judgment on the Last Day. I’ve already said a couple of things about that. Another was that I write my books simply in order to become famous. This post will be the second one on that. The third, which I will also deal with in a couple of posts, is the claim that I have led so many people astray (harming them, the truth, and reality as we know it). First let me finish with the view – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 18th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Writing to Become Famous?

I’ve been referring to the reactions that I received from my former classmates at Moody Bible Institute about some of my posts about what my experience was like there. Some of them, as I indicated, warned me of future judgment. Others made some a rather belittling comment: that I have written my books simply because I have wanted to become famous. My sense is that nothing I say would ever change someone’s mind if that’s what they are already inclined to think, but I do want to say something about the matter from my own perspective. When I started out in my publishing career, I had no idea at all of becoming well known and that certainly was not a goal of mine. Very, very far from it. My goal was to be a widely respected scholar among New Testament scholars; I wanted to become a world-class expert on the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament. I had no idea at all of reaching out to the general public in anything I wrote. I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 15th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Threat of Judgment

Since I’ve been making these posts about my experience at Moody Bible Institute, I’ve been getting some reactions from former classmates there. Some of these are in a public forum I’m on. Others have been private communications. A few of these have been kind and heartening. Others … not. Among the latter, some have told me that they pity me because of where I will end up on the day of judgment. Others have suggested that I changed my theological beliefs because that would help me become famous. Some have expressed both sadness and outrage that I have “led so many people astray.” So, dealing with these kinds of comments one-by-one, in one post at a time. First, the day of judgment. Well, none of us knows what will happen on the day of judgment, but I think I’m glad none of my classmates has been appointed to be the judge! That hasn’t stopped them from judging in the present, of course, and one would think they would be a bit wary of that, given [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 14th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Education at Moody

In thinking back on my days at Moody Bible Institute, part of my now-ambivalence has to do with not just what I learned (or more important, what I did not) but also about how the thinking process itself was handled. That has both a downside and an upside, and I would like to say something about both. I should start by reiterating that I am simply talking about my own personal experience. Everyone’s experience would have been, and was, different. Still, my strong sense is that my experience was not simply a result of my personality, although it certainly was in part that, but also as a result to how education itself was approached at Moody. How did one get good grades at a school like that? By mastering tons of material. Committing lots of things to memory. Knowing exactly what a teacher taught and being able to reformulate it, without changing its substance, in one’s own words. What was not taught, so much, was how to think for oneself. When one *did* get encouraged [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 13th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Moody Experience

Here I continue with my reflections on my fundamentalist past. For me, as an inordinately gung-ho evangelical Christian teenager, passionate about learning about the Bible, Moody Bible Institute was the ideal learning environment. More than just about anyone I knew, even there, I thrived on the academic side of the school. Moody at that time did not give a bachelor’s degree. It was a three-year diploma. For a degree, one needed to transfer credits and go to another college. That’s what I did after my three years, when I could transfer two of those years to Wheaton and graduate from there with a degree in English literature. There was no English literature to speak of at Moody. In fact there was no liberal arts curriculum of any kind. It’s not because they rejected the liberal arts as … too liberal. (!) It’s that the school simply wasn’t interested in the humanities, the social sciences, or the hard sciences. Who cares about such things? What matters is the Bible. Hence the name of the school: Moody [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 12th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Fundamentalist Beginning

Lately I’ve been thinking a good deal about my completely ambivalent relationship to my past, in particular in relation to my education at Moody Bible Institute. In part my thinking has been set off by an email I received from my roommate and best friend at the time, and for years, who was the best man in my wedding and confidante and most closest male friend I had ever had. He has remained a committed evangelical Christian all these years and continues in ministry. We never have contact any more, but he reached out to me to say hey, and I’ve been flooded with memories and thoughts since. There is a very big part of me – probably the most noticeable part – that is deeply resentful toward my time at Moody. But there is another part that occasionally arises to the surface, which realizes that in many ways those three years were very good for me. Without them, I would not be who I have become and what I am. Sometimes I forget that. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 11th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why I Shifted My Research Plans

In my last post I started explaining how I came to work on issues of memory. My plan had been something else, to write a detailed commentary on the Gospel of Peter and other early Greek Gospel fragments. I had been committed to do this for years, with a book contract with Fortress Press for their commentary series that is called Hermeneia. Just by way of background: when I was just out of graduate school, I vowed to myself that there were three kinds of books I would never, ever write. I would never write a textbook. I would never write a book on the historical Jesus. And I would never write a commentary. The reason for each was that there simply were too many of each kind of book out there already, and I simply didn’t want to tread where so many others had trod. So much for my vows. I did end up writing a textbook on the NT. That wasn’t my idea; my publisher twisted my arm and I agreed, and I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:55-04:00March 30th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Non-Disclosure Agreement and the Gospel of Judas

I broke off the thread on the Gospel of Judas and the non-disclosure agreement that I had to sign at … at the point where I had to sign the non-disclosure agreement! Here I resume. So the deal was this: in order to be allowed to see the manuscript, to examine it, to have access to a translation of it, to study the translation, and to write an essay based on it for the National Geographic’s intended book on the Gospel of Judas – all of this before anyone else in the universe (apart from Rodolphe Kasser who had access to the manuscript, and the people that he was working with to restore it) had a chance to see it – I had to agree not to tell anyone about it. The choice was this: I could agree not to tell anyone, and so be given access to the text and its translation; or I could decide not to agree and not be given access. I didn’t like the choice, but it was really a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:22-04:00February 10th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Christian Apocrypha|

How I First Learned that the Gospel of Judas Had Been Discovered

I started this thread by mentioning a non-disclosure agreement I once had to sign, involving the Gospel of Judas. To explain the situation, I have been discussing how I first came to know about the existence of the text. After receiving an out-of-the-blue query about the Gospel of Judas I looked it up to refresh my memory: it was allegedly a book used by a group of Gnostics named the Cainites, a book that told the story of Jesus from the perspective of Judas Iscariot, his betrayer – not in order to malign Judas but, evidently, to celebrate his deed, since it was (somehow) to Jesus’ advantage. Soon after reading up on the Gospel (there was very little to read about it, since we didn’t have it; all we had were some comments in the writings of church fathers who opposed it, principally Irenaeus), I received a second phone call, this one from a person at National Geographic, asking what I knew about the Gospel of Judas. I obviously realized that something was up. So [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:05-04:00February 4th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Christian Apocrypha|

Non-Disclosure Agreements and the Gospel of Judas Iscariot

A number of people have asked me about scholars and non-disclosure agreements. This is tangentially related to the long thread I’ve just finished on the alleged first-centry copy of the Gospel of Mark. Scholars have told us it exists and that they have had something to do with it. We all *assumed* it was because they had actually seen it and probably studied it; turns out *that* was wrong. They almost certainly haven’t studied it and evidently haven’t seen it. Why do I say “almost certainly and “evidently”? Because they won’t tell us. And why won’t they tell us? Is it because they are mean-spirited? Unreliable? Boasters-but-not-doers? Liars? No, not at all. It’s because they’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement. So, what does that mean, and what do I think about it? It turns out that I’ve been in that boat myself – of having signed a non-disclosure agreement -- and later took a lot of heat for it, a few years ago. That had to do not with an alleged early manuscript of the New [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:05-04:00February 3rd, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Christian Apocrypha, Reader’s Questions|

Talks at the Smithsonian, March 21

My friends at the Biblical Archaeology Society sent this around to some people on their mailing list, announcing my talks on March 21 in Washington DC – talks not for them (the Biblical Archaeology Society) but for the Smithsonian. Here is the announcement, with the blurb and description of the talks. Maybe some of you can come! *********************************************** If you plan to be in Washington DC during March you might try to catch his lectures while you are here. To register for his appearance at the Smithsonian in Washington DC All-Day Seminar Great Controversies in Early Christianity: The Life and Death of Jesus: Saturday, March 21, 2015 - 9:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. : http://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/reserve.aspx?performanceNumber=230583. If you are a registered member of the Smithsonian the cost is $90.00 else the cost for Gen. Admission will be $130.00. Description of lectures Jesus of Nazareth is perennially in the news. Over the course of the past year, two books about his life and death became No. 1 New York Times bestsellers: Zealot by Reza Aslan and Killing Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:04-04:00January 28th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum|

Why Do I Devote Myself to Studying the Bible?

QUESTION: The one thing that I do not understand about you is that you have stated you have lost your faith. That being said, how do you continue to work in your field? Have you ever wanted to redirect your academic career to study other subjects? RESPONSE: I get this question a lot. On one level I understand it: if I don’t believe in the Bible, why would I dedicate my life to studying it, researching about it, writing about it, and teaching about it? From the perspective of someone who has strong feelings about the Bible – for example, as a believer who holds that the Bible is the word of God or as an atheist who thinks the Bible is the root of all kinds of evil – it may seem like a mystery that someone in my boat would be interested in spending such an enormous amount of time and effort in studying it. Or from the perspective of someone who is completely apathetic about the Bible: why would you bother? But [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 13th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Don’t You Believe Like Your Teacher, Dr. Metzger?

QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman just out of curiosity, why do people pit you against your teacher Dr. Bruce Metzger? Did Metzger also find the construction of the originals impossible due to the late manuscript attestation and the inability to know what the original looked like? Or did your teacher, Dr. Metzger, disagree and hold to biblical inerrancy? RESPONSE: It’s a very good question and it has a very straightforward answer. The people who do this are all, to my knowledge, conservative evangelical Christians who find it upsetting over two of the things that I say: (1) that I am now no longer a believer because I do not think the Christian faith can adequately explain how a good and powerful God can be in control of this world when there is so much senseless pain, misery, and suffering in it and, completely unrelatedly (2) that since we do not have lots of early manuscripts of the New Testament (let alone the originals) there are places where we cannot know for sure what the authors originally wrote. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:29-04:00November 24th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Why I’m To Be Pitied for Having Been the Wrong Kind of Fundamentalist

Several readers of this blog have pointed me to an article in the conservative journal First Things; the article (a review of a book by the evangelical scholar Craig Blomberg) was written by Louis Markos, an English professor at Houston Baptist University. The title is called “Ehrman Errant.” I must say, that did not sound like a promising beginning. I had never heard of Louis Markos before – had certainly never met him, talked with him about myself or my life, shared with him my views of important topics, spent time to see how he ticked and to let him see how I do. I don’t know the man, and he doesn’t me. And so it was with some considerable surprise that I read the beginning of his article. “I feel great pity for Bart Ehrman.” So, from someone I don’t know, that’s a bit of a shocker. I can understand why a friend of mine might feel some (but not great?) pity for me at some points of my life – when I had [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:11-04:00November 1st, 2014|Bart's Critics, Bart’s Biography, Public Forum|

A Text-Critical Dissertation

The point of this short thread dealing with my graduate training is to explain why it is that lots – probably most – New Testament scholars do not consider textual critics to be competent in a wide range of fields normally associated with New Testament scholarship. I know that must seem very strange to outsiders, but it’s the case. Textual critics are often thought of as a rather strange group of technicians without broad competency in the areas that other New Testament scholars are interested in – for example, the Jewish environment or the Greco-Roman worlds from which the New Testament emerged, the historical Jesus, the interpretation of and historical problems associated with the Gospels, the life and letters of the apostle Paul, the theology of the different NT writers, and on and on. The reason for this is that to be competently trained in textual criticism is a long and hard process and it’s very difficult to do that *and* to learn all the other things that most other NT scholars are competent and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 11th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts|

My Graduate Training (Textual Criticism??)

I saw my master’s thesis as the perfect assignment to get me grounded in the entire, complicated field of New Testament textual criticism. Ever since then I’ve been in favor of students writing master's theses, even if it is not required for a master’s program. For one thing, doing so gets you into the frame of mind that you need to be in when you get to the point of writing a dissertation at the PhD level – which for most students is the first time they write a book. The masters thesis is usually much shorter – say 100-120 pages. But the layout tends to be similar. Most theses I’ve been involved with, including my own, have entailed an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. So the student learns to think in terms of writing chapters, each of which has its own thesis and point; but all of them work together in order systematically to set forth the overarching thesis of the work. This is a hard transition for some students, who for their [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 10th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Training as a Textual Critic

In some of my previous posts I’ve indicated that since I was known as a textual critic (one who worked with Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in order to determine both what the authors originally wrote and how the text came to be changed over the centuries) I was not widely seen as a candidate for writing a New Testament textbook for undergraduates. Several readers have expressed some perplexity over this. Aren’t textual critics, by their very nature, background, and training, proficient in the wider field of New Testament studies? The answer may surprise you: it may be that they should be, but many (at one time, most) are not. It’s a little hard to explain why, but I’ll try. As is my wont, I’ll start autobiographically. In my case, the great bulk of my graduate training actually had very little to do with textual criticism. When I came to Princeton Theological Seminary as a master’s student ) in 1978 (after I had finished my BA in English at Wheaton college), I was required [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 9th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Getting the Facts of My Life Straight

I have to admit, I sometimes get a bit tired of being the whipping boy for fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christian apologists. If they would deal with my views head on and actually get the facts of my life right, it would be one thing. But when they publicly accuse me of holding, or having held, positions that I never did – when they are flat our wrong in what they say about me -- it gets under my skin. The first time I noticed this in a big way was when Craig Evans – a long time colleague and friend – indicated, in writing!, that the reason I had become an agnostic was that I came to realize that there were differences in our manuscripts of the New Testament. Good grief. I had known about differences in our manuscripts from the time I was sixteen years old!! I had studied them and known all about them in all the years I was a fundamentalist. These differences had nothing – Zero, Nada, Not a Thing [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 6th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum|

My New Testament Textbook

I thought I would take a few posts to talk about what I’m working on these days – for the past month or so, with another month or so to go. As many of you know, I spent almost the entire summer doing nothing but reading books and articles about “memory” and related topics (such as the telling of stories in oral cultures) from a variety of perspectives: cognitive psychology, neurology (very low level!), anthropology (oral cultures and how they pass along their traditions), sociology (communal memory), folklore (urban legends, rumors, gossip), and so on. All of this was in preparation for my next trade book dealing with what we can say about the oral traditions of Jesus as they were passed along in the years before the Gospels were written. I am still leaving open the possibility of writing a scholarly monograph on a similar topic. But I have had to take a break from all that. And with huge reluctance. There are dozens and dozens of books and articles that I’m still desperate [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 22nd, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

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