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Bruce Metzger Beliefs, My Loss of Faith: A Blast from the Past
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Bruce Metzger Beliefs, My Loss of Faith: A Blast from the Past

Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations

Bruce Metzger Beliefs, My Loss of Faith: A Blast from the Past

I mentioned my mentor, Bruce Metzger, in a recent post. In this blast from the past, I reprint a post I did almost exactly four years ago, in response to a question that I was then asked about how Metzger, a devoted Christian and minister of the church, responded to the fact that I (one of his closest students) lost my faith. The question generated a series of posts on related topics, but here is the one where I actually answer the question: Bruce Metzger Beliefs I have come now, by an unusually circuitous route, to answer the question that got me started in talking about my relationship with Bruce Metzger, my work for the NRSV Bible translation committee, my view of the NRSV as a translation, the textual problems of Luke 22:19-20 and 22:43-44 and, well sundry other things. The reader’s question was how Metzger responded to my loss of faith. When I first got to know him, I was a strong evangelical Christian. In the years before he died, I had become [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 12th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Textual Criticism is “Safe” for Conservative Christians

It is probably not an accident that when I was a very conservative evangelical Christian who wanted to get a PhD in New Testament studies, I chose to focus, in particular, on textual criticism, the study of manuscripts in order to establish the wording of the original text. That was, and is, a fairly common “track” for evangelicals who want to be biblical scholars. Maybe it’s not as common now as it used to be. But it used to be common. As it turns out, most of the scholars who work in the field of New Testament textual criticism in North America either are or used to be committed evangelical Christians. You might think that the findings of textual criticism would drive evangelicals away from their faith. But just the opposite is the case. I know very few people who have found their faith challenged by their knowledge of the textual problems of the New Testament. Very few indeed. I was a bit of an oddball that way. (I’ll say more about that in a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 11th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Charities We Support

This week’s Reader’s Mailbag is not about a specific question I have been asked once but about a general question I get asked a lot. People have indicated several times they would like to have more information about the charities we support on the blog, and so I thought it was time to explain that again (I’ve done it only a couple of times over the years.) So when I started the blog in 2012, I set up a non-profit foundation, The Bart Ehrman Foundation, whose sole purpose is to collect the moneys raised by the blog and distribute the moneys to charity. Any donations to the blog are fully tax deductible. When I set the Foundation up, I expected we would raise something like $20,000 a year. Woops. Bad estimate. To date we have distributed $339,000 in funds to charities. Each year (until, alas, this one it appears! L) we have raised significantly more than the year previous. Last year (my fiscal year runs April 1-March 31, because of when I started the blog) [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 9th, 2016|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Do Most Manuscripts Have the Original Text?

Early on in my study of textual criticism I came to realize one of the major issues confronting scholars in the field – an issue that scholars have been contending with since the eighteenth century. For the past hundred years or so the vast majority of experts have been convinced by a solution to the problem, but the solution was slow in coming, for all sorts of reasons. But when I was first introduced to the problem I learned there were two sides that were being taken, and I wrote a paper about it (my first year in college). I continued to be interested in the problem for a long time, and it ended up being the subject of the Masters’ thesis I wrote under the direction of Bruce Metzger. The problem is this. We have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament – at last count, somewhere around 5600 manuscripts in Greek alone (that includes everything from small fragments the size of a credit card with just a few letters written on them to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 8th, 2016|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

My Original Interest in Textual Criticism

As I have indicated, my interest in textual criticism – the scholarly attempt to reconstruct what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote, given the fact we don’t have the originals but only altered copies – did not originate with my going to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with Bruce Metzger. On the contrary, I went to study with him precisely because that had been an area of fascination for me starting in my first year of college, as an eighteen year old. I mentioned already that I had a course at Moody Bible Institute that dealt with the questions of biblical inspiration (how God had inspired the biblical writers to say what they did), the formation of the canon (how God had ensured that we got the right twenty-seven books), and the problem of the text (the fact we don’t have the copies produced by the authors themselves). I was deeply interested in all three areas, but was especially intrigued by the third, for a couple of reasons. One reason was theological. I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 7th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Does James Contradict Paul?

I have a number of questions that I want to address in my Readers’ Mailbag, but one particularly important one requires a rather long response, and so I dedicate this entire week’s mailbag to answering it. Here it is: QUESTION: Bart, what is your view with regard to Paul and James teaching on the doctrine of justification by faith – are they contradictory? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a perennial question among readers of the New Testament. I deal with it at some length in my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, in a chapter called “Does the Tradition Miscarry,” where I talk about whether Paul saw eye to eye with Jesus, with James, and with later traditions about Paul (e.g. in the Acts of Paul and Thecla). My answer about the letter of James may surprise some readers, who would expect me to find it completely at odds with Paul. Here is what I say in the book: ****************************************************** The most famous passage of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 4th, 2016|Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

How You Can Help!

Last week I asked you what you really liked about the blog and what you would recommend we change. I was gratified to hear lots of things people like and even more gratified to hear relatively few things that people don’t! I have taken all of your comments to heart and will keep doing things that seem to be working and try to change things that are not. My big concern in sending out my request for feedback was that our fundraising is not keeping pace with last year, at a time when I want to be doing *better* than last year! I did get a number of suggestions that were very helpful, and I thank you all for them. On my part, one of the things I will start doing (in addition to incorporating other changes that have been suggested) is saying more about the charities the blog supports. I think there is just a general, vague sense that “all the money goes to charity.” It would be useful, as readers have pointed out, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 3rd, 2016|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Where Did the Trinity Come From? Video Lecture.

Here is the third of my three talks that I gave last year at Coral Gables Congregational Church in (suprise) Coral Gables, Florida, on my book, "How Jesus Became God." This lecture deals with one of the most important questions in Christian thinking: where did the idea and doctrine of the Trinity come from? Good question! I try to answer it in this video. Enjoy! Please adjust gear icon for 1080p High-Definition. How Jesus Became God -UCC Part 3 of 3: If you don't belong to the blog yet, JOIN!! You get good stuff like this ALL THE TIME, for very little cost. And all proceeds go to fight hunger and homelessness. So join!

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:57-04:00September 2nd, 2016|Book Discussions, Constantine, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Video Media|

How I Discovered Textual Criticism

It was at Moody Bible Institute that I first became interested in the textual criticism of the New Testament. Let me stress a definitional point that some readers on the blog have not gotten or understood (I’ve said it a lot, so apologies for those who have gotten it! But even though I keep saying this, some people still don’t get it). Textual criticism is NOT the study of texts to see what they mean. For the last time (well, probably not): it is not the interpretation of texts. Textual criticism, instead, is the attempt to determine what an author actually wrote if we do not have his one and only original copy. It is independent of the question of what the author might have actually *meant* by what he wrote. Textual criticism is done on all texts – even modern ones. There are textual critics who work on Wordsworth. They try to determine if it’s possible to know the actual words of his original poems (given the fact that we have different editions and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00August 31st, 2016|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Learning to Teach at Moody

I will not be continuing this autobiographical thread (thread within a thread) for much longer (you may be glad to know), but I do want to get to the ultimate point (for the thread outside the thread), which is why by a couple of quirks/flukes I ended up better equipped to write books for general audiences than most of my colleagues in my PhD program. The first has to do with what happened with me back in my days at Moody when I was learning tons about what was actually in the Bible (and the fundamentalist way of interpreting it all) (which, at the time, of course, I thought was the *only* correct way to interpret it). At Moody, every semester we were required to engage in some kind of formal ministry (“Practical Christian Experience”). Everyone at Moody had to do one semester of “door-to-door evangelism,” where we were taken to one neighborhood or another somewhere in a suburb of Chicago, and literally knocked on doors to talk to people to try to convert them. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:29-04:00August 30th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Moody Bible Boot Camp

Back to my narrative about becoming trained in the Bible (as a prelude to what I started talking about -- why my later technical training actually made me better prepared for writing books for general audiences than my peers who were not at all interested in the technical side of things). So, I went to Moody Bible Institute – and took that entrance Bible exam – when I was all of seventeen years old. And it was during my first semester that I decided what I wanted to do with my life. I really, really, really do not advise doing that. For 99.999% of the human race, it would be a very bad idea indeed to decide how to spend the rest of your life when you’re all of seventeen and can’t even yet order a beer (drinking age back then, in the Pleistocene age, was eighteen) (and anyway, we weren’t allowed to drink beer at Moody) (or smoke, play cards, dance, or go to movies) (really) (and there was a dress code). But I’m [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:29-04:00August 29th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Am I A Better Person as an Agnostic? A Blast from the Past

I have started re-posting some of my posts from three or four years ago on occasion, at the suggestion of several people on the blog. Frankly, I don't remember even writing most of them! Here is one from four years ago, a response to the question of how losing my faith affected me -- did it make me a better (or worse) person? ***************************************************************************** QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, I am still reading your book (God's problem) which seems to be very interesting since you are not interesting to gain any approval from anybody but only to communicate what you believe and where you are today. Congratulations for that…. Did you became a better human being after losing your faith? RESPONSE: Great question! Most people have assumed the opposite, that anyone who loses his or her faith must become a worse person. The logic seems to be that without a belief in God, there would be no grounds for morals and that people left to their own unconstrained devices would have no reason to avoid living [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:29-04:00August 28th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Beginning My Study of the Bible

This thread is becoming a tapestry. Its ultimate goal is to explain why, unlike most scholars, I ended up being able to write trade books and not only scholarly books. I’m taking a rather circuitous route to getting there (to change the metaphor). In my last post I discussed how and why I first became interested in the Bible, back as a fifteen year-old born again Christian. At that point I became convinced that only Bible-believing Christians (who were, of course, also born again) were the real Christians and any other people who claimed to be Christian (for example, most of the people who went to my own Episcopal church) were not *really* Christian, except in name only. Again, the reason I thought so is because the born-agains I hung around with all said so, and they seemed to know what they were talking about. Especially the fellow who “led me to Christ,” a mid-20s something fellow named Bruce. Bruce had a winsome personality and strong charisma, and he ran the Campus Life Youth for [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:29-04:00August 25th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Original Passion for the Bible

I have been talking about the areas of New Testament studies that were emphasized in my Masters and PhD programs at Princeton Theological Seminary, back in the late 70s and early to mid 80s. It was a long program, even though I sped through it a couple of years faster than most of my colleagues. The Masters program was three years (that is typical for a masters of divinity degree); my PhD was four years (most of my friends took five to seven). That’s full time work, for all those seven years. It’s a lot! Most of the training that most of my friends/colleagues had was in New Testament exegesis and theology, as I’ve described. My passions lay elsewhere, and my plan is to talk a little about them. But it just occurred to me this morning that my *original* interest in the New Testament was in fact exegesis and theology, even though I would not have used those terms for it. I had been mildly interested in the Bible even as a child. Very [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:13-04:00August 24th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Different Ways of Describing the Theology of the New Testament

To return to the current thread: I’ve been discussing why most scholars are not equipped, trained, or inclined to write books for a general audience, and that took me, naturally, to the field of scholarship in which I myself was principally trained, biblical studies. My ultimate point is going be a somewhat ironic one, that precisely because my particular interests were in one of the most highly technical, obtuse, mind-numbingly detailed aspects of New Testament studies, this (strangely) made it *more* possible for me to write books for non-specialists. The logic will not be obvious, but I’ll explain it. To get to that I’ve been talking about the two areas most of my peers and colleagues in my PhD program were principally interested in: (1) the exegesis of the New Testament (the matter of interpreting the texts of the New Testament in order to see what they appear to have meant in their original context – not an easy task, given all the work required for it, including an understanding of the Greek language and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:13-04:00August 22nd, 2016|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

How We’re Doing on the Blog

Time to pause and take the pulse of the blog. I’d like your feedback, if you’d be willing to give it (see below). We’ve been at this for four years and five months now, without a stop in the action. Every week for the entire period I’ve posted 5-6 times, normally about a thousand words a pop. In addition, I have posted numerous videos and audio recording. Every week I now devote one post to answer members’ questions, on the Weekly Readers’ Mailbag. On top of that I approve all the comments that come in – normally 20-30 a day – and respond to questions that come in there. So the content continues to come and that’s all to the good. My ultimate goal, as you know, is to raise money for charity, and that too is good: this past (fiscal) year we raised $117,000. Fantastic. That was a sizeable advance over the previous year, which saw a sizeable advance over the previous year, which saw a sizeable advance over the first year. My HOPE [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:13-04:00August 21st, 2016|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Work as a Historian and Paul in Conflict with the Jerusalem Church: Readers’ Mailbag August 20, 2016

Some people (conservative Christians who don’t like my scholarship) maintain that I’m not a historian, a view I find very odd since virtually all of my scholarship (for well over twenty-five years) is historical. I address the question in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag, along with a question that many readers will find more interesting (since it’s more germane to anything), of whether Paul and the Jerusalem church were on the same page theologically or if there were tensions between them. If you have any questions you would like me to address in a future Mailbag, let me know! QUESTION: In a debate online a Fundamentalist friend said you were a textual critic and not an historian. I said you wore both hats. Do you also consider yourself a historian? RESPONSE: Anyone who thinks I’m not a historian simply has never read any of my books – including my books on textual criticism! The vast majority of my books are not even about textual criticism, but about the history of early Christianity (first to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:13-04:00August 20th, 2016|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Video of How Jesus Became God: Part 2 (of 3)

On January 29-31, 2016, I gave three talks at Coral Gables Congregational Church in (surprise) Coral Gables, Florida, all on my book, "How Jesus Became God." I posted the first of the talks last week. Here now is the second. Please adjust gear icon for 1080p High-Definition. How Jesus Became God -UCC Part 2 of 3: If you don’t belong yet to the blog, JOIN! You will get lots of posts (5-6 a week), videos, and comments. Tons of stuff, for very little money. And all proceeds go to fight hunger and homelessness.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:57-04:00August 19th, 2016|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Video Media|

Another Approach to New Testament Theology

There is another aspect of the study of New Testament theology to what I discussed in yesterday’s post. That post was focused on how one “does theology” with the New Testament – that is, how one uses the New Testament texts in such a way as to inform, critique, call into question, authorize, and dialogue with the important intellectual and practical aspects of life as a Christian, both individually and in community. That is the sort of thing theologians do who are interested in the sacred texts of Scripture, and it is something many of my friends who were doing PhD’s in New Testament studies were ultimately invested in, especially since most of them saw their graduate training in the field to be preparation for serving the Christian church. But there is another equally important aspect of New Testament theology that is more historical in its focus. If you imagine a spectrum of disciplines with exegesis (the determination of what an author originally meant, to put it in its simplest terms) on one end, and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:13-04:00August 18th, 2016|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Studying New Testament Theology

This thread has turned into an explanation of why most New Testament scholars – that is, professional researchers and teachers with a PhD in the field – are not well situated to write books for a general audience. My reflections on that question – once I get around to it – are probably not what one would expect. At least they seem ironic to me. But before going there (in a later post), I should stress that what is true of NT scholars is true of virtually all scholars in virtually all fields of intellectual inquiry. Most are not equipped (or inclined) to write books for their next door neighbor. They are trained and interested in producing scholarship for other scholars, sometimes just for a small coterie of scholars who are specialists in their own narrowly focused field of intense research. (I need to emphasize that I do not think this is a bad thing at *all*. I think it is a very good thing. Scholars are trained to advance scholarship. We only need a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:13-04:00August 17th, 2016|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

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