Can Christians Study the New Testament Honestly?

Summary

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Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman

Episode: Can Christians Study the New Testament Honestly?

Released: September 12, 2023
Host: Megan Lewis
Guest: Dr. Bart Ehrman

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Episode Overview

This episode explores a foundational question in biblical scholarship: Can Christians approach the New Testament with academic honesty, or do their faith commitments necessarily color their interpretations? Host Megan Lewis and Dr. Bart Ehrman (New Testament scholar and bestselling author) delve into Ehrman’s personal journey from evangelical belief to agnostic scholarship, the challenges of “bracketing” religious bias, and the logistical and emotional realities faced by Christian and non-Christian academics in the field. The discussion is rich with insight into how scholars—believing and skeptical—navigate faith, evidence, and intellectual integrity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ehrman’s Personal Journey: From Evangelical to Historian

(Start – 08:23)

• Beginnings in Evangelical Faith:

  • Ehrman started as a born-again Christian in high school, viewing biblical study as “understanding God’s word” without questioning its accuracy.
  • “It was more important to memorize the Bible than it was to analyze it deeply because it was God’s word.” (Bart Ehrman, 04:18)

• Shift to Critical Scholarship:

  • Exposure to broader fields at Wheaton College and Princeton Theological Seminary introduced rigorous historical and literary criticism.
  • Learned that “being responsible theologically means accepting the truth for what it is and not pretending it’s something else.”
  • Noted influence from mentors who integrated faith with historical honesty.

• An “Aha” Moment:

  • While studying the Book of Acts, Ehrman realized discrepancies between Acts’ portrayal of Paul and Paul’s own letters reflected the author’s agenda, not strict historical fact.
  • “It suddenly went on like a light bulb to me that Acts can’t be accurate in these portrayals because of certain discrepancies...” (Ehrman, 06:52)

2. Must You Be Christian to Truly Understand the New Testament?

(08:23 – 11:23)

• The “Insider” Claim:

  • Some argue only committed Christians (with the Holy Spirit) can grasp Christianity’s “truth.”
  • Ehrman counters: acquired major “historical” insights while still a believer; current debates with Christian scholars are on historical, not theological, grounds.
  • “People think it [recognizing biblical problems] has bearing on whether Christ died for my sins or not. People think it does, but it doesn’t.” (Bart Ehrman, 08:45)

• On the Holy Spirit as Guide:

  • Ehrman critiques the argument that the Spirit alone enables understanding: If so, why do Spirit-led interpreters deeply disagree?
  • “If the Spirit guides people into all truth, is he guiding people in completely opposite directions?” (Ehrman, 10:25)

3. How Christian Scholars Navigate Belief and Academic Honesty

(11:23 – 16:51)

• Modeling Honest Scholarship within Faith:

  • Story of Bruce Metzger, devout Christian scholar, who accepted Genesis as myth:
    “I don’t think that we should tell God what kind of literature he inspires. Why can’t God inspire myths?” (Bart Ehrman, 12:15)
  • Metzger’s approach: accept findings of scholarship, and rethink what inspiration might mean.

• Wrestling with Doubt and Moving Past Fear:

  • Ehrman recalls agony as faith and evidence clashed. Found comfort in Augustine:
    “All truth is God’s truth...you don’t have to be afraid of it.” (Ehrman, 13:24)

4. Recognizing and Bracketing Bias

(16:51 – 22:15)

• Bias is Universal:

  • Even scholars claiming objectivity have biases. Key is “bracketing” these biases to avoid circular reasoning.
  • “You cannot be unbiased and be a living, breathing human being. The question is, how do you approach a question and do your very best to bracket your biases?” (Ehrman, 17:00)

• Traditions and Their Influence:

  • Evangelical traditions emphasizing scriptural inerrancy find it hardest to acknowledge contradictions or historical problems.
  • “If your conclusions have to match your assumptions, then your assumptions are determining your conclusions. That just means you’re arguing in a circle.” (Ehrman, 15:09)

5. The Reality of Cognitive Dissonance

(18:57 – 21:22)

• How Scholars & Laypeople Manage Discomfort:
  • When evidence challenges faith, the instinct is to seek supporting authorities rather than change views; reinforce group consensus.
  • “One way you accommodate [cognitive dissonance] is by finding other people who agreed with your views in the first place... you must be right.” (Ehrman, 19:27)

6. Does Critical Study Necessarily Undermine Faith?

(21:22 – 22:15)

• Faith Need Not Collapse Under Critical Inquiry:
  • Historical findings “may lead you to alter your faith,” but there’s “no historical reason not to be a Christian.”
  • Examples of colleagues who remain committed Christians while embracing critical methods.

7. Rigorous Research & the Limits of Inerrancy

(22:15 – 28:30)

• Evangelical Approaches & Their Boundaries:

  • Fundamentalists holding inerrancy often focus on topics (like textual criticism) that avoid confronting contradictions.
  • Some tailor graduate research topics to avoid areas of historical tension, limiting full critical engagement.
  • Example: disparate scholarly consensus on Pauline authorship; critical scholars restrict analysis to "undisputed" letters, while evangelicals insist on all 13 but must adapt methods when publishing in secular journals.

• Methodological Issues:

  • Methodologies requiring “suspension of faith” (e.g., historical criteria for Jesus’ sayings) are fundamentally incompatible with strict inerrancy.
  • Analogy: creationist obtaining a geology PhD (logic fails when foundational assumptions conflict with disciplinary norms).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the academic journey:
  “For me, teaching undergraduates is the perk. It’s so much fun, so I’m having a great time with it.” (Bart Ehrman, 01:22)

• On bracketing assumptions:
  “It’s really hard to bracket what you personally believe and just try to look at the evidence... Sometimes it takes years.” (Ehrman, 16:14)

• On critical scholarship as a believer:
  “I just can’t be afraid of going where I think the truth leads me.” (Ehrman, 13:24)

• On cognitive dissonance:
  “If you get a lot of people who agree with you, then you must be right.” (Ehrman, 19:27)

• On the difference between belief and evidence:
  “History is not founded on personal religious belief. It’s founded on historical data.” (Ehrman, 40:22)

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Important Timestamps

• Dr. Ehrman’s early faith & biblical study: 04:18 – 06:43
• Critical shift through seminary & key “aha” moment: 06:52 – 08:23
• Addressing the “inside” vs. “outside” perspective: 08:23 – 11:23
• Examples of faith-informed scholarly rigor: 11:44 – 12:47
• Emotional impact of questioning faith: 13:18 – 15:02
• Universal biases & bracketing in scholarship: 16:51 – 18:57
• Cognitive dissonance and seeking support: 19:27 – 21:22
• Critical scholarship’s effect on faith: 21:22 – 22:15
• The limits of inerrantist research: 22:36 – 28:30

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Listener Q&A Highlights

(33:34 – 40:16)

• Do Christian scholars pray for divine inspiration in their academic work?
  • In conservative circles, yes; in critical or mainline academia, typically not.
• Does software now aid biblical textual criticism?
  • Yes, significantly advances in digitization have made manuscript comparison incomparably easier than the days of microfilm.
  • “The computer can immediately show where all the places are different and can calculate percentages of agreement and differences... It was painful. Now you don't have to do that at all.” (Bart Ehrman, 35:53)
• Advice for learning Koine Greek?
  • Many online options exist, but having a knowledgeable guide is essential to avoid developing bad habits.
  • Caution: isolated “New Testament Greek” isn’t the same as full classical Greek training.

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Closing Summary

(40:22 – 41:35)

Ehrman wraps up with a fundamental observation: Bias is inherent in all scholarship, but rigorous historians strive to bracket those assumptions—religious or otherwise—to let evidence, not preconceptions, shape their conclusions. While it is challenging, especially for those in traditions emphasizing biblical inerrancy, it is possible for Christian scholars to engage honestly with their texts—provided they’re willing to let their findings inform their beliefs, not the other way around.

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Next Episode Preview: The show will discuss the Gospel of Peter, a remarkable non-canonical Christian text with unique perspectives on Jesus’ death and resurrection.

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For more information on Bart Ehrman's courses and the upcoming “New Insights in the New Testament” Conference:
Visit Bart Ehrman’s website, and use discount code mjpodcast for course and conference discounts.

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Transcript

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[Megan Lewis]

Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis.

Let's begin and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. Today we are talking about studying the Bible as an historical document as opposed to an article of faith, something that biblical scholars generally aim for. This is obviously easier for academics who are agnostic, atheist, or follow a different religious tradition. But how do Christian scholars treat their own religious text as the object of academic study? And does this make them any less of a committed Christian? Before that though? Bart hi, how are you doing today?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, I'm doing fine. We started classes this week and I'm teaching two undergraduate classes. For me, they're small classes, 24 students, students each. One is just first year students and one is for anybody. One is on the Christianity in the second and third centuries. The other is Jesus in scholarship and film, which I love. The thing is that I've had a lot of colleagues over the years who look on teaching as kind of the way that they can get into the research like they do it because it allows them to be research scholars. And I've never seen it that way. I mean, you know, I obviously love research, but for me, teaching undergraduates is the perk. This is the perk of the job. It's just so much fun. So I'm having a great time with it.

[Megan Lewis]

Do you get a decent mix of students from across different disciplines when you teach these more general classes?

[Bart Ehrman]

Very few religious studies majors. A number of students are just taking it because they're interested in the topic. My class with my first year students this year, I asked them how many of you were warned not to take this class. About six people raised their hands and then two of them told me that they were in a Christian high school. There were different students, didn't know each other, different schools, different parts of the country or whatever. And in their education in high school, they had Been in one of the classes. They had been assigned to read one of my essays and to respond to it. So. Really? And so I said, why are you here? I said, yeah, well, you know, I didn't like that class very well. How are you doing?

[Megan Lewis]

Yeah, good. Everything is ticking along quite nicely. Kids are all back in school, everyone is, fingers crossed, healthy for the minute. And I'm planning Akkadian classes for next semester. Starting in the winter. I've got a six week Intro to Akkadian class to teach.

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, you had mentioned that before.

[Megan Lewis]

Yeah, I'm excited about.

[Bart Ehrman]

So is it a lot different from Sumerian?

[Megan Lewis]

Yeah, completely different. It's next door to Hebrew as well. It's a Semitic language, so they work very similarly. But Sumerian is totally unrelated. It's usually recommended though that if you're learning Sumerian, you have some understanding of Akkadian because there are like cognate words and the same signs kind of get used logographically. So that, that does help. But no, grammatically speaking, they're totally distinct.

[Bart Ehrman]

Interesting. Yeah. Okay, good. I mean, it sounds kind of like Greek and Coptic in a way because, you know, Coptic uses the Greek Alphabet, grammar is nothing related, but there are a lot of loan words, that kind of thing.

[Megan Lewis]

Yeah, no, that sounds very similar.

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah. Okay.

[Megan Lewis]

All right, then we should get stuck in. So we've spoken before, I think almost a year ago about your own religious journey and for most of your early career as a New Testament scholar, you were also a practicing Christian. For you, what impact did your faith have on your scholarship? And did that impact change as you moved away from kind of evangelical fundamentalism?

[Bart Ehrman]

Right, so I started out being interested in the Bible, particularly after I'd had a born again experience in high school and became a committed evangelical. And for me, the point of studying the Bible was to understand God's word. So there was no sense that, you know, you were going to challenge it or like disbelieve anything in it or question anything in it. It was a matter of knowing it and learning what it really meant. That did involve some scholarship because to know what a first century writer meant when writing in Greek, even if you don't know Greek, you've got to learn at least what the meaning of certain Greek words would be and what they meant in their historical context and how they're used more broadly in the environment. And so it does require scholarship, but it's not a kind of scholarship that where you would question anything. It's more important to memorize the Bible than it was to kind of analyze it deeply because it was God's word. So that's how I started out.

[Megan Lewis]

How did you move from that, then to a more critical approach?

[Bart Ehrman]

You know, I went to the Fundamentalist Bible College, Moody Bible Institute, and that's all we did, is basically study the Bible and related topics. But when I went to Wheaton College, I majored in English and started being trained in literary analysis. And I started taking classes in cultural history of the west. And, you know, I would be dealing with philosophy and history and, you know, other topics that I didn't see see at the time as particularly related to my biblical scholarship. But after a while, I started realizing that a lot of these things actually are relevant. When I went to Princeton Theological Seminary, that's a Christian seminary. It's a Presbyterian school training Presbyterian ministers. The faculty are, I suppose, virtually all Christians, and I'm sure they're all Christians, and many of them are ordained ministers. But they're serious scholars, and they didn't have a fundamentalist view of things. They recognized they were scholars who recognized, you know, look, there are historical problems of the Bible, and being responsible theologically means accepting the truth for what it is and not pretending it's something else, that you can still be theologically responsible and completely committed to Christ and the church and recognize the historical problems of the Bible. It took me some years to get used to that because I thought, these people are a bunch of liberals. What do they know? But eventually I started seeing the wisdom of that.

[Megan Lewis]

And once you kind of made that shift, did it have any difference on your scholarly. Your views or your conclusions as an academic?

[Bart Ehrman]

Absolutely. I mean, I remember some clear moments, I guess maybe when I was a senior in my Masters of Divinity program, which is the program that trains people to be ministers. A lot of people then were taking the Masters of Divinity so that they could go on and do a PhD and that's what I was doing my senior year. I was taking a seminar on the Book of Acts, the account of the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman world, where Paul is a key figure. One of the things we were doing in that seminar was comparing what Acts said about Paul's missions and his teachings and his life, and comparing with the things that Paul said about the same topics. You know, when there's overlap between what Paul says about something in his life and what. And what Acts says about his life, we're comparing them, and it suddenly went on like a light bulb to me that Acts can't be accurate in these portrayals because of certain discrepancies and more important, I realized why he was changing things. His changes reflected perfectly well his own agenda, as could be seen in other passages. And so I began to realize that Acts is writing history in a way to reflect his theological beliefs rather than simply writing what actually happened the way it happened. And that applied of course then to the Gospels and, and everything else. So the conclusions that I was drawing at that point finally were quite different from what I could have drawn earlier. Because if you think the Bible has no mistakes of any kind in it, then Acts has to be historically accurate.

[Megan Lewis]

So kind of related to your views when you started out as a Christian academic. It gets argued that people who aren't Christians can't truly understand Christianity in a way that Christians can, and by extension then the New Testament. Obviously you're now an agnostic and also an expert in the New Testament and early Christianity. So what's your opinion on that viewpoint?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, I think it's completely wrong. You know, people, that's one way to kind of safeguard the faith, I guess. If you confronted with scholarship, historical scholarship, one way to say it was that's just not Christian. If they were Christian, they'd see the truth. And you obviously can't understand Christianity unless you're doing it from the inside. I recognize that understanding and I appreciate it because it was a view I used to have as well, but I don't think it's true. One reason I don't think it's true is because many of the views that I have now, the historical views I have now, I acquired when I was a committed Christian. I wasn't a fundamentalist. I still believed in Christ for salvation. I still believed in God. I mean, I was still a Christian, but I realized that if the Bible has problems, it doesn't make any sense to stick your head in the sand and pretend it does have problems. But that has no bearing on the question whether Christ died for my sins or not. People think it does, but it doesn't. The views I have now as an agnostic atheist about the Bible, many of them are just the ones I acquired while I was still a Christian. And others of them are built on foundations of things I had when I was still a Christian. And when I have arguments with my scholar friends who are still committed Christians about the Bible, we're completely on the same grounds. They never ever say, well, yeah, you can't understand because you're not a Christian. They understand perfectly well what historical scholarship is and they do it. It's just that, you know, they have other reasons to Believe and I don't.

[Megan Lewis]

What then do you think about people who insist that you have to be Christian to understand the New Testament, you have to also have the guidance of the Holy Spirit. That's something that I have seen a few times.

[Bart Ehrman]

I know, me too. And to be told that, you know, well, you can't know because you don't have the Holy Spirit and you know, we do. Yeah, okay. I mean, I used to think that too. It doesn't make any sense to me just on an empirical level. If having the Spirit is what is necessary to understand the truth, then why is it that all these people who have the Spirit don't agree with each other about the truth? I mean, if the Spirit guides people into all truth, is he guiding people in completely opposite directions? Because, you know, allegedly spirit led interpreters are completely at odds on major issues. And so it doesn't look to me like there's any evidence that the Spirit leads people into truth. It seems to me that people, you know, want to say that the Spirit does, or maybe they feel the Spirit does, or they're completely convinced the Spirit does, but it doesn't seem to be right. And often people who don't have the Spirit come to the same conclusions as the people who do have the Spirit. And often the people that do don't agree with each other. So it doesn't make any sense to me.

[Megan Lewis]

How then can or should Christian academics go about understanding a text that they hold to be divine, that they hold to be maybe influenced by the Holy Spirit or inspired by or however you view it as? How should they investigate it in an historical manner to be responsible scholars?

[Bart Ehrman]

My mentor in my PhD program, Bruce Metzger, was a very devout Christian. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister, had a very traditional upbringing and had a very solid belief in the Bible as inspired. He did not think it was inerrant, though. He thought that God wanted people to use their intelligence in order to examine His Word. And Metzger had interesting ways of dealing with the issues that scholars deal with. I mean, I remember quite clearly him talking to a large class one time about the Book of Genesis and the creation stories and Adam and Eve. And he was quite clear that he thought these were myths. They were not things that actually happened historically. But then when, you know, a student objected, well, you can't say the Bible has myths in it. And Metzger's reply was, well, I don't think that we should tell God what kind of literature he inspires. Why can't God inspire myths? So he was doing his scholarship while he was retaining his Christian belief. And it just kind of altered the way he looked at it. Instead of saying that God can't do this, that, or the other thing, he's saying, look, the reality is this is what it is, and so God can do it. Why can't he do it? So there are ways to do it and remain faithful to the tradition, to the faith. It might mean you have to kind of change the faith, but I don't think it's, you know, a good approach to just to think you can't do historical research if you're going to be a Christian.

[Megan Lewis]

So when you were moving away from Christianity, how did you deal with that kind of issue?

[Bart Ehrman]

Because I was so committed to the Bible as an infallible guide to life and to belief. For me, it was emotionally wrenching thinking that there might be historical realities that conflict with what you find in the Bible. And I was troubled by it. And I worried about my salvation. I worried about being wrong. I worried about offending God and all of that. But I took comfort in an idea that was advanced by St. Augustine. I wasn't particularly interested in 5th century theology at the time. I was interested in the Bible. But one quotation that's frequently made of Augustine is him saying that all truth is God's truth. In other words, if something is true, it comes from God. And so you don't have to be afraid of it, you don't have to pursue it. And if you do it intelligently and honestly, you don't go into it. I didn't go into it wanting to trash the faith. I wanted to know the truth because I thought if it's true, then that's what God thinks. So I decide I just can't be afraid of going where I think the truth leads me. And it doesn't necessarily mean agreeing with what my teachers at Moody Bible Institute said. It might mean looking at the evidence and just seeing for myself what it looks like. And people always objected to me for this. And they say, look, you shouldn't always argue with God. And my line was always, I'm not arguing with God, I'm arguing with you. I don't think you understand the truth. And they say, well, I don't think you. I say, I got it, but let's look at the evidence and see. Instead of saying that, you know, that I'm arguing against God and you're on God's side, that's not a very helpful argument.

[Megan Lewis]

Do you think there are some factors that make it more likely that one's religious convictions can adversely impact your scholarship?

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, well, definitely. I mean, it's funny because it's the flip side of what we were just saying because, you know, some very conservative Christians would say, well, you know, if you're not a Christian, you can't understand this. Other people say, look, you know, if you're such a committed Christian, then your belief might get in the way of understanding the, you know, the reality. That's absolutely true. I mean, it's true of every religious tradition. Christians would acknowledge that this is true of other religious traditions. Christians always say that. Muslims, for example, you know, they're just blindly accepting what somebody tells them because it's obviously not true. Or I know a lot of, like, evangelical Christians who say that. These Mormons, man, they don't. They're just. Just going on the basis of what they're told in their church. They're not actually looking at this very intelligently, you know, the Book of Mormon or whatever. And so when it's the other tradition, it's easy to see. It's very hard to see it in your own situation. That's the difficulty. How do you recognize that your own assumptions about anything. But here we're talking about religious assumptions. How do you protect yourself from having religious assumptions determine your conclusions? Because if your conclusions have to match your assumptions, then your assumptions are determining your conclusions. That just means you're arguing in a circle. You're not looking at evidence. You're just trying to find a way to make yourself right what you already think. So the big step that's very, very hard for people to do. I encounter this all the time with my undergraduates. It's really hard to bracket what you personally believe and just try to look at the evidence that you find. Sometimes it takes years for somebody to be able to do that, but once they do it, they realize, oh, wow, yeah, I see it now.

[Megan Lewis]

So do you think there are some Christian traditions or educational trajectories that make this easier? Maybe for some academics to do.

[Bart Ehrman]

My sense is that it's especially hard for people who are in the evangelical tradition who believe that the Bible is without mistakes. It's harder for them to come to realize that there's a contradiction between this gospel and that gospel, because in their view, there can't be contradictions. People grow up in mainline churches, you know, who might be Episcopalians or Lutherans or Methodists. They tend not to be as troubled by that kind of thing. The point I'll make, though, it's a point that came out of my first year seminar yesterday where students were talking about what they saw as the difference between studying the Bible, studying Christianity, studying religion in a church context versus doing it at a research university? And typically what kids say at this state is they say, well, you know, in university they're objective and, you know, in church they're just believers. And they're usually saying that because they grew up in church and they always heard the same line and they realize they're going to hear other lines now. But then I always ask them, so you think that unlike university professors don't have any biases? They say, well, I guess you have some. Yeah. Oh, boy, do we have biases? I mean, like, everybody has biases. This is not a question of how to be unbiased. You cannot be unbiased and be a living, breathing human being. You're going to have biases. The question is, how do you approach a question and do your very best to bracket your biases so that you're willing to realize that you have been wrong about something you really believed before? That's hard to do, but you can do it. You can do it. And it doesn't mean you have to change your mind, but you're open to changing your mind. My view is that a lot of scholars don't even do that. Biblical scholars, they really, they just can't bring themselves to bracket their assumptions. Especially biblical scholars who are preaching, you know, saying the stuff that they grew up on in Sunday school. They're saying, you know, all the scholarship demonstrates that they were right when they were 12. And I don't know, it seems funny to me.

[Megan Lewis]

So that tension of believing one thing and having historical evidence that kind of pushes back or challenges your personal beliefs is kind of like a cognitive dissonance. It makes you mentally uncomfortable to hold those two things together, and it's hard to do. Do you think that maintaining a Christian faith while studying the Bible in an academically rigorous and responsible manner requires that level of cognitive dissonance? Or is it actually not as. As complex as I'm making it out to be?

[Bart Ehrman]

It is complex. And I think what happens frequently, not just among scholars, but certainly among scholars, but also among laypeople, is that they'll see something that they like. They realize, wow, if that's true, then that's going to really affect how I see things. And I don't know if I want to go there. And so what they do is they find other scholars who have looked at the same problem and have come up with kind of a quasi convincing explanation for it and they latch onto it. Oh, yeah, well, so. And so, you know, at Oxford says this. And so, yeah, so there's not a problem. And so they appeal to authority. And that happens a lot among scholars. You know, they realize, God, this would be a problem, and they, they solve their cognitive dissonance. So for people who don't know, the idea of cognitive dissonance is that you, you've got a cognition, you've got an idea in your head that you're really, really committed to that could be disproved. And when it looks like it is disproved, dissonance breaks in. The reality is dissonant with your cognition. And psychologists since the 1950s have shown that. What happens then is you have a mental mechanism to accommodate it somehow. And so you accommodate it. One way you accommodate it is by finding other people who agreed with your views in the first place. If you get a lot of people who agree with you, then you must be right. And so that's why in evangelical churches, for example, it's very hard to break out because everybody has the same view. And if you feel like breaking out, you get convinced. Oh, yeah, I guess I'm right because everybody else agrees with me. And so that happens within scholarship as well, because scholarly communities, they're not churches, but evangelical scholars are evangelical scholars, and that's who they associate with. It's the same thing with mythicists and with atheists. It's. It's a similar problem, but everybody has to figure out some way to try and bracket their assumptions and their beliefs when doing the kind of research we do.

[Megan Lewis]

Does bracketing religious belief and treating the Bible as an historical text say anything necessarily about one's religious conviction?

[Bart Ehrman]

No, I don't think it should. I mean, I think historical findings may lead you to alter your faith. I, for the life of me, can't think of any historical reasons to leave the faith. I don't see any historical reason not to be a Christian. There might be moral grounds or philosophical grounds or other things, but historically, I mean, history is history. I've said this repeatedly on here. My close friends are two Presbyterian ministers who have PhDs in the New Testament, who taught for 30 years historical critical studies of the New Testament, who agree with me on most things, and they're active in their church. They wouldn't believe what a lot of other Christians believe, maybe, but they still consider themselves Christian and are committed to it. It doesn't have to destroy a person's faith.

[Megan Lewis]

My final question is looking again at this idea of divine inspiration and the Bible being inerrant. Do you think it's possible for an academic to hold that view of the biblical text and still conduct rigorous academic research? Or do you think that inerrancy part is a hurdle that has to be overcome?

[Bart Ehrman]

It's a very tricky question. I just had an email exchange with somebody who does believe. A friend of mine for almost 40 years, over 40 years, who is a professor at a evangelical theological seminary who absolutely believes in the inerrancy of the Bible and is involved in high level scholarship. But my sense is that the kind of scholarship in biblical studies that you can do is limited. If you believe that there can't be any errors at all. Because if you believe that and you're not willing to ever change your mind on it, then it precludes certain kinds of scholarship, but it allows for other kinds. When I was an evangelical conservative evangelical, still committed to the inerrancy of the Bible, my decision was that I wanted to do my PhD working on analyzing ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament to see how the manuscripts, mainly the Greek manuscripts, differed from each other in places, to figure out why scribes changed the text when they did, and to figure out what the original authors wrote. That's an extremely rigorous form of scholarship in New Testament studies. It's not one most people pursue because it's really kind of detailed and picayune and like mind boggling detailed and boring for most people. So most people don't do that. But it's a field that a lot of evangelicals go into because you're not forced to deal with things like contradictions in the Bible or theological differences or geographical mistakes or things like that. You're analyzing manuscripts, which you could do if you're studying Homer or Plato or something. And so it would have no bearing on whether you believe what's in there. My idea was to do that so I could get credentialed having a PhD and maintaining an evangelical view. So I would have the credentials to teach in a university as without having to confront these kinds of issues. Another thing that a lot of scholars do in America, a lot of young scholars who graduate from college or from seminary, they'll go to university. Like in England, for example, there are a number of students who take degrees at Oxford or Cambridge or Edinburgh or whatever because they don't have to take seminars. It's basically a matter of writing a dissertation and then they pick a dissertation topic that they can do without having to kind of wrestle with a lot of, a lot of these issues. I'm not saying everybody who goes to England for a PhD does this. I'm just saying this is one route that was open to me that I thought seriously about going to Cambridge to do that and not to do textual criticism, but to do interpretation and to do that kind of thing. That's a route people take. But I, I think really it's very hard.

[Megan Lewis]

So what makes it hard for, for academics, Christian academics, specifically evangelical, more fundamentalist people, to do the kinds of study and research that you've gone on to

[Bart Ehrman]

do, you know, they certainly can, they can publish in the academic journals and they do. And so that's, that's all good. The problem is that I'll give you one example. When scholars study the writings of Paul and they really want to know what Paul's theology was, for example, they limit themselves to the seven letters that we're pretty sure Paul wrote, the seven so called undisputed Pauline letters. There are six other letters in the New Testament that are debated by scholars whether Paul wrote them. And the vast majority of critical scholars say no, Paul did not write 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, for example. But evangelicals, conservative evangelicals will say, well, of course he wrote one and two Timothy and Titus, and they'll mouth their arguments for it and the other side will mouth their argument. But the reality is, I really look carefully, I don't think you could publish an article in one of the major international journals of biblical studies using 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus to make an argument for what Paul really said. Because the consensus is he didn't write those things, but you think that he did. And so what evangelical scholars have to do in those situations is to just say, look, I think he wrote all 13, but I'm just going to stick to the 7. You see what I mean? So they can't really then explore things the way that others who take the critical consensus do. And so it just, it creates certain problems. And I'll tell you, it's always been a problem with me when I've had PhD students who come in with a very strong view of the inerrancy of the Bible just to get them to agree to do the kinds of things critical scholars do. You know, I'm not forcing them to change their beliefs or anything, but it's like if you're going to, you've got to apply this method, you know, this particular method, it requires you to have certain kinds of assumptions.

[Megan Lewis]

What kinds of methodologies require you to have that suspension of faith?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, if you think that the Gospels report things that Jesus did not really say, they have him say it. It's very hard to develop criteria for establishing what Jesus actually said based on our sources. If you think that every word in the Gospels is what he said, your criterion then is you read the Gospels. But that's not doing a critical scholarship. How do you even engage in it? You know, you have to almost say, you know, if I were doing this from a critical point of view, I would do it like this, you know, something like that, I guess. I don't know. But so it does create problems. I mean, it'd be comparable. It's comparable to if somebody was a six day creationist who thought that the world was created in six days sometime maybe 6,000 years ago. It'd be very hard for that person to get a PhD in geology, you know, or somebody who believes that Adam and Eve were created as human beings and that they weren't descended for something else. They're not going to be able to get a degree in evolutionary biology or whatever. And it's just because their assumptions are so contrary to the field. So that's the problem.

[Megan Lewis]

I see. Thank you. I think we will pause there, take a quick break and then we'll be back with some news about your work and then some listeners questions following that.

Have you ever wondered where the New Testament Gospels really came from? Were the books actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? As everyone seems to say, the answers to these questions may surprise you. In fact, what you discover may challenge everything you thought you knew about the Gospels. If you're ready to learn the historical truth, then you won't want to Ms. Bart Ehrman's free webinar. Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? In this 50 minute talk talk with Q and A, you'll learn answers to some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the Gospel's authorship, such as why did early Christians say the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? If they're anonymous, what's the best evidence that the Gospels were written by the apostles? Were the apostles of Jesus educated well enough to write books? And last, if the apostles did not write the gospels, who who did? And where did they get their information? Don't miss your chance to uncover the truth behind the Gospels. Sign up now for free lifetime access to Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually Write Matthew, Mark, Luke and [e-mail] Authors thank you.

Welcome back. We are going to have a now quick update from Bart.

[Bart Ehrman]

This is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, ehrmanblog.org happenings and online course launches.

[Megan Lewis]

So. But we have about two weeks left until the new Insights in the New Testament conference kicks off. We've spoken about all of the speakers and it's getting close.

[Bart Ehrman]

It's getting close and man, I'm getting a lot of good feedback about this thing because it's, you know, as I've said before, I don't know why nobody's thought of this before. I guess just when, when Covid hit, we started realizing the possibilities of remote interactions. And so, you know, there's, there's never been anything like this where you get 10 top, I mean world class scholars to talk about the Bible, that they're real experts in the Bible and the New Testament Gospels, in this case talking to people on a lay level. So that they're going to be very highly intelligent talks but they're going to be completely accessible to non scholars and all on different topics. And I'm, I'm really pumped because I, I haven't heard any of these talks myself except I actually haven't even heard my talk. I'm talking about something I've never talked about before and so I'm, so I just think this is going to be great with Q and A. And I don't know if we're talking about this, Megan. There's going to be this follow up session the weekend afterwards where I talk about the other people's talks.

[Megan Lewis]

Oh no, I didn't know that. That's fantastic.

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, that's, People can sign up for that too. Where I'm going to go through, you're just going to talk about, you know, kind of do my take. You know, I'm not going to go after anybody who's jugular or anything. I'm just going to be like, wow, you know why that was interesting and important and so there's a lot tied up in this thing and I just, I'm just really excited about it. I think it'll go really well.

[Megan Lewis]

No, I think it will. And I wanted to ask you as well. In assyriology there's this kind of internal narrative that what we do is so esoteric that no one could possibly be interested in it. And My time on YouTube has shown me very conclusively otherwise. Is there that same sense in academic study of the New Testament that actually this stuff is just, it's just not interesting to people outside the field?

[Bart Ehrman]

You know, I think people who've never like heard an interesting talk on it probably think that, you know, a lot of people maybe have heard pastors try to explain something in a rather boring way, and it's going, oh, God, okay, just, you know, get to the point and sort of thing. But when you hear a serious scholar actually get into what's the interesting stuff, all of these topics, if you're interested in the Bible, this is just interesting. And even if you don't know much about it, but you'd like to know something about it, you know, I. If you're not interested, you know, if you rather, you know, be watching NASCAR or something, then that's fine. That's fine. But if you actually do have any interest in this material, this is going to be as good as it gets.

[Megan Lewis]

So this is for those who have missed the past several episodes where we've talked about this. This is the new Insights in the New Testament Conference. It will be running September 23rd and 24th. There will be 10 scholars spread across those two days giving fantastic lectures. And you can listen back to previous episodes to get kind of the rundown of those. The cost is $59.95 and you can sign up at www.ntconference.org. you can also use the podcast discount code mjpodcast to get a discount on your ticket price. So highly recommended. Lots of fun, Very interesting. And that is the 23rd and 24th. So we're going to now have some listeners questions before we wrap up for the day.

[Bart Ehrman]

Now it's time for questions from listeners where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans. If you'd like to submit a question for future segments, please visit bart erman.com AskBal Heart

[Megan Lewis]

But I have chosen some questions that are not really about history, not really about the New Testament, but are about the study of it. I thought that was probably useful given the topic of today's conversation. So, first question. As a psychology graduate, now in my 60s, who has transitioned fairly frequently between agnosticism and Christianity, currently a believer, I'm very interested in the extent to which Bible scholars who identify as Christian allow themselves to seek divine intervention or inspiration in their studies, much like an evangelical preacher might do before delivering a sermon. Is this something you've given much thought to? And is this something that you consciously did when you were a believer?

[Bart Ehrman]

That's a really good question. My sense of it is that that does happen in evangelical circles with people who are deep believers in the inspiration of the Bible and in the need for the Holy Spirit to guide interpretation. That was the approach that we took when I was at Moody Bible Institute and at Wheaton. And you'd always pray for guidance, and you would assume that you needed the guidance. When I started going to Princeton Theological Seminary, a more mainline, as a Presbyterian seminary, more historically oriented in its scholarship, that wasn't done. Classrooms would often start with prayer. They never had the kind of assumption that, you know, that if the Spirit guides me, I'm going to find the truth here. Because they realize that different scholars had different opinions about everything based on evidence. And so I don't think that it normally happens among critical scholarship, but I do think that it does happen in more conservative Christian circles.

[Megan Lewis]

Next question is asking about using software, computer software for textual criticism. It says, do you specifically. But I suspect the questioner would also be interested to know if this is true across the field. More generally, do you use software to detect differences between manuscripts or construct and evaluate manuscript family trees?

[Bart Ehrman]

The answer is that that's become a dominant feature of the study of manuscripts now. When I was learning to do this, there was no option of doing that at all. If you wanted to compare manuscripts to find out, like, where two manuscripts were different from each other, you had do it on microfilm. There are these crusty old microfilms that we had to get from Germany. You know, you get a microfilm machine where you kind of crank things up and you kind of go through till you got to where you're looking. You look at John 13, you crank through till you get to John 13. You'd have to figure out what John 13 was because you didn't have any way to get it. You know, they don't have titles or chapter numbers or anything. You kind of go through until you get there, and then you get some other magic. You do that and then you compare word for word. Like you look at here, you look there, you look there, you look there. Oh, my God. That was complicated. But starting in the late 80s, maybe early 90s, they did develop computerized ways of doing things where you just had to read a single manuscript. You might do it on microfilm back then. Today, you don't need to do a microfilm, but you would simply note where the manuscript had a difference from a standard text of some kind. And if you have enough manuscripts that you would just enter the differences among the various. You have the same standard text. Suppose you've got a Textus Receptus or a printed New Testament text. If you do 10 manuscripts like that, where you just point out this difference from the standard text here and here, this Word this phrase. You just do that separately. The computer can immediately decide, show where all the places are different and can calculate the percentages of agreements and differences and do all sorts of statistical analyses that we had to do by hand. I actually, man, I spent a lot of time adding up numbers, doing my dissertation and comparing manuscripts. Just, oh, God, it was painful. And now you don't have to do that at all.

[Megan Lewis]

I feel like assyriology is catching up to that interest in computer aided study. There's a lot of really interesting stuff going on with computer assisted reading of cuneiform and translation and that kind of thing. It's really interesting.

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah. Well, if you can get the computer to read the manuscript, then you're really onto something because that saves some work.

[Megan Lewis]

You do then have to teach the computer how to read all of the handwriting.

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, I know, I know.

[Megan Lewis]

Which is a different thing entirely.

[Bart Ehrman]

Tricky. Yeah.

[Megan Lewis]

Okay, final question. I am interested in learning Koine Greek. I'm wondering if Bart can recommend some resources for learning at home.

[Bart Ehrman]

I'm afraid I don't really know people do this and there are lots of online resources to do it. My strong suggestion is that anyone who uses whatever online sources look most attractive to them, that they have somebody who can guide them through it, either just to ask questions of or to check their work. Most people who are learning Koine Greek are doing it for the study of the New Testament. Because if you're in a, you know, if you're in a classics department and you, you take introductory Greek, you don't learn Koine Greek. Normally you'd be learning Attic Greek. So classical Greek from the time of, you know, like, you know, Aristophanes and Plato and that kind of thing back 4th, 5th century Athens, you learn that kind of Greek, which is different from Koine, not, not hugely different. But if you learn the Attic Greek, the classic Greek, you can read the Koine. If you learn the Koine, it's really hard to read the classical. It's hard to go that direction. Most people learn the koine to be able to study the New Testament. And it means that often they're actually not learning Greek, they're learning something they call New Testament Greek, which is kind of what that, that would even be like. I mean, it's like, you know, it's like reading, I don't know, Charles Dickens, you know, like David Copperfield's I'm learning David Copperfield English. So you just learn the words that are in that book, you know, the grammar that's in that book. And so People should learn broadly Greek, but the problem is that it's very easy if you're doing it on your own to slip up and not know it. And you don't want to get bad habits doing that. I've taught myself a number of ancient languages and I know how hard it can be, but I did that only after I had formal training in three of them. It's very hard. And so it's worth doing. It's absolutely worth doing. So my only recommendation, small recommendation, is that you find somebody who can help you out and make sure you're doing it right. A lot of people get things wrong and they then end up interpreting some verse in some crazy way and they just don't know. They don't know.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you very much. Bart, before we finish for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we talked about?

[Bart Ehrman]

So we're talking about a very interesting topic about the basic issue is how does a big a person's biases affect their understanding of religious traditions? Especially when they're studying their own religious tradition. If they're not in that tradition, does that handicap them because they don't really know it from the inside? But on the other hand, more germane to some of the things we're talking about, if somebody is deeply committed to the tradition, can they actually approach the study in some kind of disinterested way without their biases determining their conclusions? And I was trying to say that. In fact, I think it's possible to try to bracket your views, your assumptions, but it's clear that most people don't. Even people who claim to, they don't. If you end up concluding exactly what you were assuming to begin with, then you might want to take a look, take a second look at the evidence. So those are the kinds of issues we're talking about of real importance for the study of the New Testament in particular, because historical scholarship presupposes that history is not founded on personal religious belief. It's founded on historical data.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you so much, Bart. Thank you for sharing your time and your knowledge with us. Audience thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.www.bartehrman.com. that code is also good for the New Testament conference as well, so please remember to use it if you're going to buy tickets. Misquoting Jesus will be back next week. But what are we talking about next time?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, as, as listeners know, there are a lot of books that are not in the New Testament written by Christian scholars, Christian, ancient Christians, many of whom claiming to be apostles. And our next talk is going to be about one is absolutely one of my favorites and the Gospel of Peter, which was discovered in the 19th century. And man, it's a it's a mind blower in some places. And so it's a gospel many people don't know, but they should. And it has a very interesting account of Jesus, death and resurrection. So that's what we'll be talking about.

[Megan Lewis]

Fantastic. Thank you all and goodbye.

This has been an episode of Misquoting

Jesus with Bart Ehrman.

We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday. So please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel. So you don't miss out from Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.