Bart D. Ehrman

Bart D. Ehrman ( born October 5, 1955 in Lawrence, Kansas) is an American religious scholar.

Life and work

Bart D. Ehrman received a strict religious evangelical upbringing. In order to deal intensively with the belief he studied the ancient languages ​​of the Bible. He earned the Master and the Doctor at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is now a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The more he grappled with the Bible, the more he became convinced that the Bible is revealed not free from error and from God, inspired well into the individual words, as he had initially thought; Rather, the Bible is a very human book, with all the hallmarks of a man-made work: discrepancies, contradictions, errors and different perspectives of different authors who have written at different times for different reasons for different recipients with different needs. Ehrman separated from his evangelical views, but was initially a Christian.

Was decisive for his departure from the Christian faith years later, the problem of theodicy: He was aware that he could not bring the facts of life in accordance the teachings of the faith; in particular, that he - in view of all the misery and all the suffering in the world - could no longer believe that there is a good and omnipotent God who actively cared about this world.

Today, Ehrman called agnostic. He pursued intensively Walter Bauer's thesis, according to which the later as " heretical " designated parts of Christianity both temporally and factually priority plays against the later " orthodoxy ". He also works in the field of textual criticism of the New Testament. He objects to the fact that textual criticism is only meant as a tool to reconstruct a hypothetical " original text " of the New Testament writings. Instead, he sees an access to the theology and social history of ancient Christianity in the variety of different manuscripts.

Work (selection)

• Forgery and Counterforgery. The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics, Oxford University Press, New York, 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-992803-3
• Jesus in the distorting mirror: The Hidden Contradictions in the Bible and why it exists. Gütersloher publishing house, Gütersloh 2010, ISBN 3579064967
• Written off, misquoted and misunderstood: How the Bible became what it is. Gütersloher publishing house, Gütersloh 2008, ISBN 3579064509
• God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer, HarperOne, New York 2008, ISBN 0061173975
• The New Testament - A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (1997), ISBN 0195084810
• The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture - The Effect and Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament ( 1993), ISBN 0195102797