His literalist faith in and his devotional approach to the Bible were under increasing strain, but he managed to hold onto them for a while - until a professor jotted a casual comment on one of Ehrman's papers. He entered the Princeton Theological Seminary, home to the world's leading authority in the field, Bruce Metzger. So Ehrman decided to plunge all the way in and immerse himself in the academic study of the texts of the New Testament. But there was still no answer to his original question: How could we know what the word of God was if all we had were error-riddled copies?

He completed his undergraduate studies at Wheaton College, where he began studying ancient Greek, the original language of the New Testament. Burning with fervor to discover the true word of God, the authentic divine voice that had been obscured or changed by all-too-human writers, Ehrman decided to begin a serious study of the New Testament. In fact, the copies are copies of copies, and they're filled with errors or intentional changes made over decades or centuries by scribes. All we have are copies, made years later - usually, many centuries later. In one of the first classes he took at Moody, he learned that none of the original texts of the New Testament exist.

It was an intellectual problem at first, but it soon became larger and harder to quarantine. Eager to study Holy Scripture full-time, he entered the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago - motto: 'Moody Bible Institute, where Bible is our middle name' - where every professor and student had to sign a statement attesting that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, a divinely inspired document from its first page (Genesis 1:1) to its last (Revelation 22:21).īut almost immediately, Ehrman ran into a problem. Raised as a not particularly devout Episcopalian in 1950s Kansas, the best-selling Bible scholar had a 'born-again' experience as a high school sophomore and asked Jesus into his heart. Bart Ehrman's career is testament to the fact that no one can slice and dice a belief system more surgically than someone who grew up inside it.

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