Transcription
I was a fundamentalist kid, and when I was growing up, there was one name, one person, one Bible scholar who struck fear in my heart. And I knew that I had to be careful of Bart Ehrman. And it's ironic now because I've realized with time that Bart Ehrman was right about everything. And the people who told me what I was supposed to think about Bart Ehrman were actually the ones who were lying to me, and dare I even say, brainwashing me.
This is the story of how I went from somebody who hated Bart Ehrman to last week getting to interview Bart Ehrman, which was quite an honor. And it's weird, and I think kind of unlikely. If you would have told me as a 17-year-old that I would someday see the world like Bart Ehrman sees the world, that I would agree with Bart on a lot of things, and that I would even be interviewing Bart and really enjoying the conversation, I would have said, "Get out of town." And I probably would have thought that you were influenced by Satan or something like that.
But over time, my mind changed. And ironically, it didn't change from reading Bart Ehrman's books. That would all come much, much later. It came from studying the Bible and realizing that apologists were lying to me, and that Bart Ehrman was telling the truth. This is the story of how it happened.
Before we start, my name is Chris. I have a PhD in religious studies with a specialty in Christian origins. On this channel, I talk about where Christianity came from and how it works. But today, I'm talking about Bart Ehrman.
I want to take you back to when I was just a little kid, because I had certainly never heard the name of Bart Ehrman. I wasn't actually all that interested in biblical scholarship. I was just interested in reading the Bible. I was raised in an extreme fundamentalist church known as a Plymouth Brethren Church. Um, Plymouth Brethren don't have any pastors. They believe in lay leadership, and they believe that all males, which was me, they believe that all males have the right and the God-given responsibility to teach the Bible.
I remember asking Jesus into my heart when I was seven or eight years old. There was an evangelist who came to town. He gave, um, he gave an invitation after to come up to the front and accept Jesus. I didn't do that at the time, but I realized that I had probably missed out on something, and I knew that I wanted to be a Christian, and I didn't want to go to hell. And I thought that Jesus had offered me this free gift of salvation. So, I went outside, and I knelt down in, like, this little thicket of trees, and I asked Jesus into my heart. It was a real thing. It, it was real for all of my young life. Like, that was a real conversion moment, which is always an important thing to say because people are going to ask.
But I was growing up in this Plymouth Brethren church, and I was reading the Bible. I was learning as much theology as I could at that level. I mean, the people leading it didn't know a ton of theology, but they had kind of self-taught themselves a little bit. Um, I was reading the King James version Bible. I was memorizing chapters of it. And very quickly, I became somebody who was leading, like, leading kids programs, leading youth group. I ended up working at a summer camp. And I remember, like, leading kids to Christ at a summer camp. I was working, um, towards being essentially what I thought God was calling me to be, and that was somebody who could win souls for Christ and, you know, spread the good news of the kingdom. Still hadn't heard of Bart Ehrman by this point.
I went away to school in another city, and during this time, I was also playing in a Christian, uh, metal band. Got really into Christian music. If you were raised in the evangelical world at all, you probably know we had all of our own music. And I moved through all the different spectrums of music as a musician, but I landed on Christian metal, which I guess maybe gave me a feeling of, like, a little bit of, um, I don't know, not rebellion, but like, it, it felt kind of edgy, but I could still do it within the context of Christianity. And this Christian metal band that I played in, we would travel around, and we would literally, like, go to bars and go to pubs and stuff like that, play a show, and we would always tell people about Jesus during our show. So we saw it as sort of like a way to, you know, win souls for Christ.
At this time, I also became a youth pastor. So the Baptist church that I was attending came to me when I was, I think I was 19, and they said, "We think you should be our youth pastor. We think God is calling you to be a youth pastor." And as a 19-year-old, that's like, that's a thing you take seriously. I remember always looking for those clues about where God might be leading in my life. And I took that calling very seriously. And I did become a youth pastor. I was a youth pastor for 10 years. And I led a youth group. I grew a youth group. I worked at a church. I, you know, worked under the pastor, was mentored by the pastor, all that sort of thing. That's, that's all part of my story.
Ironically, I think that the point of my deconstruction actually began with reading the book, *The Case for Christ*. Now, this sounds really counterintuitive because the book, *The Case for Christ*, as I understand it, was actually written to keep people in Christianity and even bring more people to Christianity. I think that was the point that Lee Strobel was trying to make with that book. Um, but *The Case for Christ* was a book that for the first time convinced me that having my faith could be reasonable, that having a faith was the best evidence of the world. And I, you know, I was in a world where I was going to university, and I would, like, I was engaging with other viewpoints that were challenging to the things that I believed. And having this book that essentially took biblical scholarship and, and like, took some theology and like, took different philosophers and like, having this book that interviewed a lot of really smart people and told me that these really smart people all kind of agreed that the evidence for Christianity was, you know, true and, and you know, basically the thing to believe. That was really powerful for me.
I remember reading this book, but it also turned the lights on because it turned the lights on that I could use my brain and start to study things and become a person who defended the truth of Christianity. And this is about the time, you can kind of see where this is coming. This is about the time, I think, where I probably discovered Bart Ehrman. I don't remember reading any of Bart Ehrman's books when I was still a Christian. I, like, why would I? I knew Bart Ehrman was wrong in my head. Um, I had been told Bart Ehrman was wrong. So if I did have exposure to Bart Ehrman, it was usually through watching Bart Ehrman in a debate with somebody else where I was basically expecting him to get trounced by this other person because I was sure that Bart Ehrman was wrong. And slowly, I saw this name, this name of Bart Ehrman as basically like the quintessential enemy Bible scholar. I still see it used a lot like that today by different people. And Bart Ehrman was somebody that I knew because I had been told that I was pretty sure that was somebody who was kind of dangerous and had some dangerous ideas. And I actually set out to defend the faith from people like Bart Ehrman. I thought, and in my corner, I started reading Christian apologetics. I remember reading *Evidence That Demands a Verdict*, standing in the library of my church one day, just standing there and reading it, and for the first time seeing, like, "Oh, people say that there are contradictions in the Bible, or people say that different manuscripts say different things." And this was my introduction to these problems I had never even thought about before. And honestly, if I hadn't thought about them, I mean, I'm sure I would have figured them out somewhere, but I'm not sure that if I had thought about them, I really would have even cared that much. I was just doing my thing. I was practicing my faith.
But the world of Christian apologetics offered me something that was really seductive, and I still think today is really seductive for people. It offered me a way to prove, essentially, to prove that my faith was rock-like, the most certain thing, to prove that my faith was true. And I started to read the work of Christian apologists, and that was the first step.
I remember going to seminary. Still hadn't read a Bart Ehrman book, for the record. Going to seminary. And when I got to seminary, I started looking at biblical studies. And I didn't end up, like, deconverting. I didn't end up, like, I didn't, I didn't deconvert because I read liberals. I deconverted because I read the Bible. I didn't deconvert because I read Bart Ehrman. Still hadn't read Bart Ehrman.
But what happened is I learned how to look at manuscripts. I learned how to look at the tradition. I realized, like, how to use a critical edition of the Bible and see that there were, there were different problems in manuscripts, things that I had never really thought that much about before. I remember back to *The Case for Christ*, these arguments about, like, "Oh, there are 25,000 or 5,000 manuscripts, depending on how you count, of of the New Testament, and they're all so accurate." And then I remember realizing, "Well, yeah, but they're the earliest ones aren't like the later ones are, but the earliest ones are quite a bit different." And what do we do with those differences? Or it was things like recognizing that there were different, different books in the earliest Bible. What do we do with that kind of stuff? Or of course, recognizing that the earliest Christians didn't apparently see Jesus as divine. I think probably the author of the book of John did in a certain way, but I don't know that the other gospel writers did, or if they did, it certainly wasn't like the Trinity. And I couldn't find the Trinity in the New Testament at all.
And these were the types of things that I realized for myself. But it's important to say that I didn't read a Bart Ehrman book and realize there were problems with the Orthodox corrupting scripture. I read the critical edition of the Greek New Testament. I read biblical scholarship and realized that there was a problem with the manuscripts. I just read the Bible, and I realized for the first time that the Bible had problems I had never seen before.
I started to see contradictions, like the famous one in the Judas story between Matthew and Acts, where you have a very clear contradiction about how Judas died in about five different ways. And my fundamentalist side said, "No, I can reconcile it. Like, I can work it out." But I couldn't. And it's funny that as I began to study in biblical scholarship, like, as I came to seminary and started to get trained to actually understand biblical studies and theology, I still hadn't read a Bart Ehrman book, but I had, by this point, read a lot of the basic introductory stuff to biblical studies and started to realize intuitively what those Bart Ehrman books would later tell me, all of these types of problems.
I remember a minute as I was encountering these problems with the Bible, these contradictions, problems with manuscripts, scribes who changed the Bible, whatever. I was encountering this kind of stuff, and I remember a minute of, like, flailing and going back to apologetics and trying to find satisfactory answers that could keep my faith intact. And ultimately, they all fell flat. And ultimately, I realized that Bart Ehrman was right.
And this was the point that I went and finally read my first Bart Ehrman book. I think it was *Misquoting Jesus* was the first one I read. And by the time I read that Bart Ehrman book, there wasn't really anything all that shocking about it because it was already things that I had discovered for myself. It was already things that I had seen just by faithfully studying the manuscripts and the tradition and, like, for lack of a better word, studying the Bible.
And one day I woke up and I realized Bart Ehrman was not the one who was lying to me. The apologists were lying to me. And this is really mind-bending to this day. Like, it's just, it's mind-bending that these people spend their lives lying to children. And I can try to assign these apologists, like, the best possible intentions and say, "Well, maybe they kind of have an, like, they're, they're emotionally committed to one certain outcome, and they tend to just kind of overlook the evidence that really contradicts them." But it's really hard when you look at the fame that apologists get in Christian circles, the bestselling authors. These people like William Lane Craig or the Kukkus or whatever their name is, or Lee Strobel. And these are people who lie to children for a living. That's essentially what they are. They lie to children for a living. And I can say that because I was one of the children that they lied to.
I remember reading *The Case for Christ* and coming away with this kind of, like, nice little package that Lee Strobel likes to pretend was hard-hitting journalism. I don't know if you've ever read that book, but it's, it's kind of funny. At least Strobel will be like, "Oh, I had this problem." But then he goes and, like, pretends to ask a few questions to a Bible scholar and then says, "Okay, my answer, you know, my problems are all answered." If you ever pay attention, his actual objections or his actual journalistic integrity is not very strong in that book, which is, he wrote it long after he was already a pastor, and it's basically, anyway. But you really have to ask the question, why do these people lie to children? Why did these people lie to me? That's, like, the question that I came away with.
And it's funny now because I do this on YouTube a lot, and I see kids in my comments who look like I used to look like, and they're angry. They're like, they're angry at me because I'm the quote-unquote skeptical scholar. I'm the one who they see as attacking their faith. Ironically, the things that I used to say about Bart Ehrman are now things that people say about me. And even more ironically, probably people compare me to Bart Ehrman, which is also kind of funny and flattering in retrospect, but, um, kind of ironic in the long, kind of swing of things.
In the world of evangelical fundamentalism, Bart Ehrman is kind of propped up as the boogeyman. And I remember, like, like I kind of noticed this recently because people started saying this to me in my videos. People would say that I was a skeptical scholar. And I remember I probably said that about Bart Ehrman once too. But the irony about this whole thing is that "skeptical scholar" is a way of framing evidence. Apologists use this all the time. Apologists talk about "skeptical scholar" as if the evidence is really strong for Christianity, but scholars are just predisposed to disbelief because they're skeptics. You see what that does? It's a really subtle thing. It's a subtle rhetorical move. But what it does is, by calling somebody a "skeptical scholar," you can pretend that they're the one with the axe to grind. That they're the one who's looking at historical evidence and seeing something that doesn't prove your point. That's kind of gross. That's actually a rhetorical play that apologists do. But yeah, I mean, all of a sudden, I'm being called this skeptical scholar, which is kind of weird because I've been on both sides of this. I walked that road as somebody who thought Bart Ehrman was the enemy. And then as I studied the Bible, I realized Bart Ehrman was telling the truth and everybody else was lying.
Why? Why were they lying to me? I was watching this reaction on Paulogia, and Paul had Bart Ehrman on to do a reaction to William Lane Craig. And it was interesting to watch William Lane Craig, who's also come after me, too. And watch him treat Bart Ehrman like Bart Ehrman is the one who's, you know, basically has an axe to grind. Like Bart Ehrman is the one who's can't think very clearly, or who isn't a very, you know, isn't very intelligent, or whatever. You see this kind of framing, and it's wild to me having been on both sides of this that people like William Lane Craig are the liars. People like William Lane Craig are the ones who are misleading people. And you can't even see it.
I mean, if you're a kid, if you're a teenager, and you grow up in this world, you're looking for some sort of coherence. Like, you're looking for narrative coherence that helps you make sense of the world you live in. And when you're raised your whole life to believe that one thing is true, you know, evangelical Christianity is true. For example, the Bible's the word of God. It's inherent. All this kind of thing. You latch on to people like William Lane Craig because they help you feel that those pre-existing conclusions, they help you feel like your pre-existing conclusions about faith have been thought out. They help you feel really good. And I think this is actually the role of Christian apologetics. It's to make believers feel like they've really thought things through.
But ironically, what happened is I went looking to apologetics after I started having this serious engagement with biblical studies, and I realized that apologists didn't really care very much about study. Apologists didn't, couldn't actually handle very deep questions. And I realized that, like, a lot of these people haven't even really done a lot of New Testament study. Their New Testament work is pretty light. There's some exceptions, but a lot of apologists pretending to be New Testament scholars don't even have any credentials. I look at somebody like Wes Huff, who is held up as this sort of New Testament expert, who, as far as I can tell, has never achieved a serious degree in New Testament studies. And yet, to evangelicals, he's a hero. William Lane Craig. No interest in studying the New Testament. He's a theologian. To evangelicals, he's a hero, and he talks like he studies the New Testament, which he doesn't. In my own life, I look at Rabbi Zacharias, who I thought was so brilliant, and I thought was, you know, the, the person I really wanted to read a lot to defend the faith, and it turned out he was up to some pretty horrible things and turned out to be a sexual predator. It turns out that the defense of the faith by these people is basically just theater, and that Bart Ehrman was right all along.
So, I had a chance to interview Bart a couple weeks ago, and it was sort of surreal after coming full circle as somebody who thought Bart Ehrman was the enemy to realizing that I agree with him on quite a lot of things. And it was, it was just like, it was really cool. It was, it was a wonderful interview. I'll link to it below, and, uh, you can check it out. But the really wild thing is, as I reflect on it, and as I watched this Paulogia response too, is something that Bart said in his last lecture. It was a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but check this out. Listen to what Bart says.
"And among the humanities, religious studies more than any other, because in the South, because of this thing, drives people to think because the kinds of things I've been talking to you run contrary to what they've always thought. They're going to fight against it, and they're going to find evidence for their view, or they're going to finally succumb to what I am telling you is the truth. For the broader public, we need this kind of scholarship. We need it for the Bible because the Bible's so important, but we need it because it's the kind of thing we need to be doing with our brains, using them to think."
That's the truth. That's what happened to me. It happens to millions of people. For all the efforts of the people who lied to me, I still came out agreeing with Bart Ehrman. And if you are a person in my comments or in Bart's comments yelling about skeptical scholars and trying your best to defend the faith, do your best. Dig in. I encourage you, learn as much as you can about the New Testament and where it came from and the manuscripts and the stories we tell about it. Learn as much as you can. And you might be surprised to find out that even though today you think that Bart Ehrman, or maybe even me, is the enemy, you might be surprised to find out someday that you agree with this too. Stranger things have happened.
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen. I'll see you next time.