Bart D. Ehrman

Background

Bart D. Ehrman (b. 1955) is an American New Testament scholar and textual critic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, trained at Princeton Theological Seminary under the textual critic Bruce Metzger. A former evangelical who now identifies as agnostic, he is the most widely read contemporary popularizer of critical New Testament scholarship — skeptical of orthodox claims about the text's stability and the canon's inevitability, yet emphatic, against the mythicists, that Jesus of Nazareth existed.

That double role gives him a distinctive place in this wiki: he appears as a critic of conservative positions on the text and canon, and simultaneously as the mainstream's standard-bearer against Jesus mythicism — evidence that the historicity consensus is not a confessional closing of ranks.

Corpus status: Ehrman's works are in copyright and not in corpus; the wiki flags his specific claims {{UNSOURCED}} and represents the argument-shape from in-corpus sources (Josephus, Paul, Schweitzer's survey of the classical debate).

Positions held in this wiki

• Jesus Mythicism Assessed — named as "the standard contemporary refutation of mythicism from an agnostic" (Did Jesus Exist?, 2012). The in-corpus core of the case he popularizes: the Josephan James passage (Josephus, Ant. XX.9.1), Gal 1:19 (bib), and the pre-Pauline creed.
• Canon Formation — New Testament — popularizer of the Walter Bauer thesis (regional "heresies" original, "orthodoxy" the later victor) as canon-as-victors'-list (Lost Christianities, 2003); flagged {{UNSOURCED}} in the article pending acquisition.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: none of Ehrman's works are ingested (in-copyright). Cited by title in the debate articles: - Lost Christianities (2003); Misquoting Jesus (2005); Did Jesus Exist? (2012) — not in corpus. The in-corpus texts through which his positions are represented: Josephus, Antiquities and Schweitzer 1906 for historicity; Harnack 1900 for the development view of the canon.

Principal critics

• N. T. Wright and Gary Habermas — contemporary evidentialists who contest his skeptical verdicts on the resurrection and the text (both also not in corpus; the exchange is represented via J. Gresham Machen's in-corpus antecedent arguments).
• Richard Carrier — attacks from the opposite flank: the mythicist critique of Ehrman's historicity case (not in corpus).

See also

• Albert Schweitzer — the classical survey-and-refutation of mythicism Ehrman's popular case descends from.
• Adolf von Harnack — the liberal-critical ancestor of his canon-formation position.
• Flavius Josephus — the non-Christian witness on whom the historicity case leans.