Bart D. Ehrman

Bart D. Ehrman (b. 1955) is James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Trained at Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and Princeton Theological Seminary under Bruce Metzger, he became one of the most prominent popularizers of New Testament textual criticism. Originally an evangelical Christian, Ehrman moved to liberal Christianity and ultimately to agnosticism, citing the problem of evil rather than textual issues as decisive. His scholarly work, including The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993), focuses on scribal alterations of early Christian manuscripts and the diversity of early Christianities. His trade books — Misquoting Jesus (2005), God's Problem (2008), and How Jesus Became God (2014) — argue that the New Testament text is unstable, that biblical theodicies fail, and that Jesus' divinization was a gradual historical development. Ehrman has been criticized by conservative evangelical scholars (Daniel Wallace, Craig Blomberg, Michael Kruger) for overstating the significance of textual variants, and by mythicists (Richard Carrier, Robert Price) for defending the historicity of Jesus in Did Jesus Exist? (2012). Within the academic guild, his historical reconstructions are largely mainstream, though his rhetorical framing in popular works is contested. He maintains a widely read blog whose proceeds fund charitable causes.