Last Night, the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at UNC made his 2nd appearance on The Colbert Report (Comedy Central M-TH 11:30 PM)
Ehrman's latest book
Ehrman, a professing Agnostic, teaches these following undergraduate courses at UNC:
New Testament Introduction;
Jesus in Myth, Tradition, and History;
The Birth of Christianity;
Apocalypse Now and Then;
Heresy and Orthodoxy in Early Christianity;
Jesus in Scholarship and Film;
The Life and Letters of Paul;
Jesus and the Synoptics;
The Gospel and Letters of John;
The Problem of Suffering in the Biblical Traditions;
Introduction to Hebrew Bible.
Professor Ehrman has two children, a daughter, Kelly, and a son, Derek. He is married to Sarah Beckwith (Ph.D., King’s College London), Marcello Lotti Professor of English at Duke University. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
In an interview with the BBC, Ehrman said:
“I think that there is no doubt that the Bible is filled with human error. Both the copies that we have which are changed by scribes, there is nobody who can doubt this. All you need to do is take two manuscripts and compare them with one another and they’re different: hundreds, maybe thousands of places.”
When asked if the Bible is the Word of God, his usual answer is by asking: “Which bible? Is it the Bible that you buy in your local bookstore? Is it the Bible found in manuscripts? If in manuscripts, which manuscripts?”
This is an interesting claim isn’t it? So the question still remains:
Are the biblical manuscripts we use for the modern day Bible are historically accurate and congruent?
I would encourage you also to check out, leading Dead Sea Scrolls researcher, Dr. Martin Abegg’s 2006 lecture on the historical reliability of biblical manuscripts. Dr. Abegg is one of the select few scholars in world who actually works with the physical manuscripts themselves. When it comes to the accuracy and congruency of these manuscripts, Abegg’s thoughts and beliefs are much different from that of Ehrman’s. In the lecture below, Dr. Abegg addresses claims such as:
“The bible is filled with contradictions.”
“Different manuscripts of the bible are not congruent and say different things. Therefore, it shouldn’t be trusted”
“The Dead Sea Scrolls contain more books than the Modern Day Bible. Scholars are leaving important things out!”