Bart Ehrman Archives - Canon Fodder

My New Book “Surviving Religion 101” Releases Today!

April 6, 2021

In the fall of 1989, I began my freshman year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Like many freshmen, I was excited for the next chapter in my life, eager to explore the new opportunities and experiences that college had to offer.

Of course, I knew there would be challenges. College life would not be easy, especially for a Christian. But I had grown up in a solid Christian home, was taught the Bible from a young age, and was a faithful member of my church youth group. So I figured I was ready.

I wasn’t.

The problem stemmed not from what I was taught but from what I wasn’t taught. I wasn’t prepared in the one area that would matter most in a university environment. I wasn’t prepared intellectually. And I would soon learn (the hard way) that intellectual preparation was what I needed more than anything.

My lack of preparation reached a head in the spring of my freshman year when I took a religion course titled Introduction to the New Testament. The professor was a young scholar who was bright, engaging, funny, and persuasive. It didn’t take long to see that he lectured with an eye toward evangelicals, even sharing how he was once an evangelical himself not long ago.

And then during his graduate studies, after deep engagement with the text, he realized he could no longer maintain his evangelical beliefs. The New Testament wasn’t inspired after all but was full of mistakes. It wasn’t reliable but was filled with made-up stories and fabrications. And its original form wasn’t even accessible to us but had been badly corrupted by scribes over years of transmission.

That professor’s name was [Read more…]

The De-conversion of Saruman: Five Lessons to Learn

May 4, 2020

There’s been a lot of chatter the last couple years over “de-conversion” stories. Most recently, of course, is the story of well-known pastor and author Joshua Harris, as well as the Youtube comedians Rhett and Link.

I’ve written on this phenomenon myself in a number of places, including my recent book, The 10 Commandments of Progressive Christianity, as well as my my article, “The Power of De-conversion Stories: How Jen Hatmaker is Trying to Change Minds about the Bible.”

So, what exactly is de-conversion? In short, it’s when a person who is deeply committed to the Christian faith ends up leaving the Christian faith and abandoning their prior beliefs. Sometimes this involves a wholesale rejection of Christianity (e.g., Bart Ehrman), but in other cases it involves embracing an altogether different version of the faith (e.g., Rob Bell). So, not all de-conversion scenarios are the same.

The key feature of de-conversion, however, is that the individual was once on the “inside” of the faith, and later ends up on the “outside.”

In theological parlance, this is called apostasy. And the Bible is filled with examples of apostasy, the most famous, of course, being Judas Iscariot. He was the consummate “insider” who abandoned Jesus and effectively left his old life behind.

We can also find examples of apostasy—symbolically and figuratively—in the world of literature and film. Most obvious is the story of Anakin Skywalker, once a Jedi but later wooed to the dark side of the force, becoming Darth Vader. But there are many others (think Cypher in The Matrix).

But, perhaps one of the most remarkable (and often overlooked) examples of apostasy is Saruman in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I’ve been re-reading the books lately in my coronavirus quarantine, and I was struck anew by the role he plays in the overall story.

In many ways, Saruman has always been an odd part of the plot line. With a bad guy like Sauron to occupy the reader’s attention, why does the story even need a character like Saruman? Besides, as my kids always complain, his name actually sounds a lot like Sauron’s which makes everything very confusing.

My hunch, though, is that the name similarity is intentional. Tolkien’s world is more nuanced than just the good guys and the bad guys. Instead, there are actually good guys that become bad guys—which makes things very complicated. It’s a perfect picture of de-conversion.

As such, we can learn a lot about the way de-conversions work through stories like Saruman’s. So, here are a few quick observations: [Read more…]

Are Miracles Improbable? Rethinking What Makes Something “Likely” to Happen

September 24, 2019

Our world’s skepticism over miracles is nothing new. Ever since David Hume, philosophers and scholars have been making the case against the possibility of miracles.

But, now things have shifted. Hume has been roundly (and decisively) rebutted and philosophers now realize that one cannot prove miracles are impossible. But, not to worry, now there’s a new argument. Now the argument is that miracles are simply improbable.

So improbable, in fact, that we should never prefer a miraculous explanation over a naturalistic one. Given how unlikely miracles are, it is always more likely that a miracle did not occur. Thus, it is argued, historians would have no reason to ever affirm that a miracle actually took place.

New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, has made exactly this argument. Give the improbability of the resurrection, he insists that we must always choose another explanation: “Any other scenario [besides a miracle]—no matter how unlikely—is more likely than the one in which a great miracle occurred, since the miracle defies all probability (or else we wouldn’t call it a miracle)” (How Jesus Became God, 173).

Now, this sort of argument sounds persuasive at first glance. But, it runs into some serious problems. [Read more…]

Hello, My Name is God

May 13, 2019

Did Jesus think he was God?

This may be one of the most common questions people ask about early Christology. And it reflects a long-standing scholarly debate about Jesus’s own divine consciousness. Even if other people thought Jesus was divine, did Jesus himself think so?

A number of years ago, Bart Ehrman jumped into the fray of these debates over early Christology in his book, How Jesus Became God (HarperOne, 2014). And he addressed this question about Jesus’ divine self-awareness.

Not surprisingly, Ehrman argued that Jesus never thought of himself as God. Leaning on his earlier book, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford, 2001), he says that Jesus just viewed himself as an apocalyptic prophet who was ushering in the Kingdom of God (basically Albert Schweitzer redivivus).

Ehrman adopts what he regards as the standard methodologies of modern critical scholarship, including the criteria of authenticity (and even the controversial and oft-debated criteria of dissimilarity). Of course, the upshot of Ehrman’s reconstruction of the historical Jesus is that any statements that might sound like a claim to divinity are conveniently dismissed as unhistorical.

So, not surprisingly, the claims of Jesus in the Gospel of John are considered “not part of the historical record of what Jesus actually said” (p.125). In addition, Ehrman refuses to allow any statement where Jesus identifies himself as the “Son of Man.”

Needless to say, this all works out a little too neatly. Ehrman portrays his critical methods not only as something that all scholars agree upon, but as something that leads to clear cut, unambiguous results. [Read more…]

Book Notice: The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World

February 7, 2018

Just a couple days ago I received the new book by Bart Ehrman entitled, The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World (Simon and Schuster, 2018). I had received a pre-published copy of the book several months ago and have been working through it.

The reason I have a keen interest in this volume is because it covers a lot of the same ground of my recent book which was released last year, Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church (SPCK/IVP Academic, 2017).

Currently, I am about 3/4 of the way through Ehrman’s volume and plan to review it formally in a few months. In the meantime, I have to say I am very encouraged by what I’ve been reading. I think Ehrman is spot-on in his analysis of much about Christianity in the early centuries. Indeed, our conclusions are very similar in a number of places.

[Read more…]