Reasonable Faith

Kevin: After more than 40 years in the classroom, including 37 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Bart Ehrman is retiring from UNC. While he'll still be speaking and giving interviews and so on, Bart delivered his final public lecture at UNC on December 7th, 2025. He spoke on the most significant discovery in the history of biblical studies.

One can tell from listening to this final lecture what's important to him and what he really wants to communicate. I have some key excerpts from that address, but first, in your opinion, Bill, how significant is the scholarly career of Bart Ehrman? What are some of his contributions?

Dr. William Lane Craig: His contributions to establishing the Greek text of the New Testament are very important. But I think he's relatively insignificant as a historical Jesus scholar. He's a popularizer of historical Jesus studies and the best-selling religious author with Oxford University Press. It's his popular-level books that have made him famous.

Kevin: Let's go to the first clip. What is the most significant discovery in the history of biblical studies?

Bart Ehrman: What do I consider to be the most significant discovery ever made in its history, in the history of the discipline? Our flawed manuscripts. Whoever wrote the books of the New Testament, the various books, wrote them at some time, mainly in the first century. You just take an example like whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew sat down at one point and wrote it out, maybe around the year AD 80 or 85. He wrote his Gospel. He had other sources, but he wrote something down on papyrus, and that was some time in the first century. We can call that the original thing, the thing that he wrote and then started passing around for people to look at.

Then after a while, somebody wanted a copy of it, right? So, somebody made a copy of it. Then somebody copied the copy. Then somebody copied the copy of the copy. Then somebody copied the copy of the copy of the copy. It went on like that for centuries. That thing that the person wrote doesn't exist anymore. That's not unique for the New Testament; that's like all the books of the ancient world. It's just how it was. So, you don't have originals; you've got later copies. The problem is that scribes make mistakes.

Today, we have more than a hundred manuscripts. Today, we know of over 5,800 manuscripts. How many variants do we know about? The recent estimates are around 500,000. Most of them don't matter, but some of them matter a lot. Some of them actually change what a verse means, or what a chapter means, or what a book means. Sometimes they change the theology of the whole thing. That really does matter. But that's not the most significant discovery in the history of biblical scholarship.

Kevin: That was just a tease. It's not the most significant discovery. What's your response to the manuscript variants, Bill?

Dr. William Lane Craig: The irony is that the very multiplicity of the variants and the abundance of manuscripts enables scholars to reconstruct the text of the original autographs with well over 97% accuracy. Bart Ehrman knows this.

A few years ago, I heard him interviewed on a Lutheran radio show. The interviewer said to Dr. Ehrman, "Well, what do you think the original text of the New Testament actually said?" Ehrman replied, "What do you mean?" The interviewer said, "Well, there have been all these variants, all these changes that have been introduced. What did the original say?"

Bart says, "It said pretty much what our Bibles today say." The interviewer said, "I'm confused. I thought there were all these copyist errors." Ehrman said, "Oh, yeah, but we've been able to reconstruct the text, so we know what the original says." Ehrman himself knows this, but he really misleads innocent laypeople by talking about the uncertainty introduced by all these variants.

Kevin: Bart continues with the most significant discovery.

Bart Ehrman: The findings of archaeology. Both Old Testament and New Testament are texts that people read and study and analyze. But at some point, people realize, you know, there probably should be some evidence that these things happened, like material evidence, like archaeological evidence. Well, like what? Well, in the ancient history of Israel, we have the account in the Old Testament in the book of Exodus of the children of Israel becoming enslaved by the Egyptians for centuries and growing to be a great people.

Then God raises up Moses to bring them out of their slavery in Egypt. We're told that there were 600,000 of these Israelites who were military-age men. It's not counting women, not counting children, not counting the elderly. So, we're talking two and a half or three million people. With big events like this, you kind of think there might be some archaeological evidence that they happened. These accounts are probably not historical as described in the Bible. But this, too, is not the most significant discovery of biblical studies.

Kevin: Again, Bart is teasing. But how do you respond to the lack of what should be a vast wealth of archaeological evidence according to Bart?

Dr. William Lane Craig: I've heard it said by professional archaeologists that well over 90% of the sites remain unexcavated and over 90% of what has been excavated remains unanalyzed. So, there's a lot yet to discover. I am not an Old Testament scholar and can't speak to the question of the Exodus. You need to look at an Old Testament scholar like Kenneth Kitchen, who wrote a book entitled *The Reliability of the Old Testament* if you're interested in this subject.

But what is amazing to me is that we have so many archaeological remains from New Testament times that confirm the reliability of the Gospels. For example, I'm absolutely astonished that we should have the ossuaries, or the bone boxes, of the High Priest Caiaphas and apparently of James, the brother of Jesus.

But certainly, the most important archaeological find of all is the tomb of Jesus that lies beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The claim of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to be located on the site of Jesus' tomb, which has been excavated, is very strong. So, incredibly, we have this archaeological remain of the very tomb in which Jesus' body was laid after his crucifixion.

Kevin: I've read that there is a lot of work being done on the Exodus, Bill. By the way, most of us know that absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. But is it the contention of historians that absence of evidence is significant when we should expect there to be evidence? If an elephant were in your living room for one week, you should expect some evidence of that.

Dr. William Lane Craig: As I explained a moment ago, it is very difficult to identify successfully what archaeological remains ought to be discovered. Therefore, arguments from silence are not very powerful. It would have to be highly probable that there would be remains, and then secondly, highly probable that if there were remains, then they would have been excavated and discovered by us. Therefore, arguments based on the absence of evidence are very tenuous and uncertain.

Kevin: Bart continues his speech in this next clip. What is the most significant discovery?

Bart Ehrman: The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. We had for long had very limited knowledge about Judaism in the days of Jesus. It's strange how little evidence we've had because most of our Jewish evidence about the ancient world comes to us from Jewish writings that were produced hundreds of years later, the Mishnah, the Talmud. People had some ideas. Of course, we have Jewish sources from the time of Jesus, especially the Jewish historian Josephus and other things, but we had fairly limited knowledge.

Then a hugely significant discovery was made in 1947. In 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Some of them were fairly complete scrolls. The Isaiah scroll is magnificent. It's a copy of Isaiah that is a thousand years earlier than the copy we were relying on up until then. They've vastly improved our understanding of first-century Judaism because of the kinds of things they were.

We have a description of a war that was soon going to take place that was going to be the war to end all wars. The apocalyptic end of time was going to come, and we have a scroll that describes it. These scrolls are just absolutely fantastic for enlightening us about one aspect of Judaism that we had very little knowledge of before. It's also hugely important for the relevance for understanding Jesus because these scrolls embody a worldview about the coming judgment of God against this world that's going to happen very soon to destroy all those who are opposed to God and bring in a good world that God had planned from the beginning. It's very much like the teachings of Jesus, at the same time in roughly the same area. It's not that Jesus belonged to this community, but it set the context within which to put Jesus' proclamation. Hugely significant. But not the most significant discovery.

Kevin: A final tease. He suspects that Jesus was caught up in the apocalyptic fever of the Essenes or the surrounding culture of the time. Is that what he's saying?

Dr. William Lane Craig: I think it's right that Jesus did believe that his coming represented the advent of God's reign on earth. But there's no reason to connect this with the community of the Essenes living in the Dead Sea area.

As an aside, this Isaiah scroll is very significant with respect to Bart's earlier point about the manuscript variants and the copyist errors. This Isaiah scroll, as he said, dates from 1,000 years earlier than the medieval manuscripts of Isaiah that we had. And yet, when you compare the two over that 1,000-year time, virtually no copyist errors were introduced. These Jewish scribes were so careful that the medieval Isaiah scrolls are virtually identical to this ancient Isaiah scroll.

Kevin: Bart declares the greatest discovery in biblical studies.

Bart Ehrman: The single most discovery, I'm now going to tell you, it is that the Bible's not a single book. Let me explain why this rather banal observation has made such a huge impact. The reality of the canon. You've got 66 of these books, but people treat them as a book because they're between two covers. When you read a book, you expect it to be consistent. It doesn't occur to you that the author's going to flat out contradict himself on the next page.

I simply have my students do a very basic exercise that I recommend you all do. Just read Genesis 1 and list everything that happens in order, then read Genesis 2, which is also part of the creation account, and list everything that happens in order. Just do it, compare your lists. Yeah, good luck.

If you compare what Acts says about Paul with what Paul says about Paul, Paul actually tells us what happened in Galatians chapter 1. What he explicitly says is, you can look this up, he says, "I did not consult with flesh and blood. I did not talk to anybody about it, and I did not go confer with the apostles in Jerusalem." Paul's trying to say, "No, I didn't even talk to them. It was three years before I went to talk to them," he says. In Acts, what happens? He makes a beeline to Jerusalem to talk to them.

Kevin: So, the Bible is not just one book. I didn't see that coming, Bill. You may have some thoughts on the significance of that and on the two examples of discrepancy he cites, like the creation accounts and what Acts says about Paul's conversion and Paul's account of his conversion.

Dr. William Lane Craig: It's certainly true that the Bible is not just one book. It's a collection of diverse sorts of literature by different authors who have different perspectives on things. Just to give one example, isn't it interesting that the Gospel of John has no account of the baptism of Jesus or of Jesus' institution of the Last Supper? These were undoubtedly historical events which are related in the synoptic Gospels. So, we wonder why John chose to omit these pivotal events in the life of Jesus. We don't know; we can only speculate.

But as for the examples that Bart gives, I don't think that there are any significant inconsistencies in the accounts of the creation of the world in Genesis 1 and the account of the creation of mankind in Genesis 2. The only inconsistencies concern whether or not man is created before or after the vegetation and the animals. In these two different stories, the order in which these are created is different. It's hardly something that is significant and undermines the central teaching of the doctrine of creation.

Now, as for Paul in the book of Acts, I don't know what version of the book of Acts Bart is reading because in my Bible, it certainly does not say that he made a beeline for Jerusalem. Here's what Acts 9 says: "But Saul increased all the more in strength and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ. When many days had passed, the Jews plotted to kill him, but their plot became known to Saul. They were watching the gates day and night to kill him, but his disciples took him by night and let him down over the wall, lowering him in a basket. And when he had come to Jerusalem, he attempted to join the disciples," etc.

There's no inconsistency there between what Paul says and what Luke, who was after all a traveling companion of Paul, says concerning Paul's activities after his conversion on the road to Damascus.

Kevin: How does he end his final lecture?

Bart Ehrman: One of the reasons I valued and continue to value teaching biblical studies in the modern university is because it's a way of getting people to think about how you construct arguments and what you consider to be evidence. This is very important in all the fields of the humanities: English, history, philosophy, classics. These fields are important for giving us information and for learning substance, learning data. But they're especially important because they teach you how to think.

If you don't think, well, okay, they still let you vote. The humanities are vital to this country. At the time when we need people to be able to see the difference between truth and falsehood, when we know what is right and what is wrong, when we know whether an argument is any good, when we look to see if the evidence is actually there, those are the things taught in the humanities.

It's precisely at the moment that we are cutting humanities in our universities. This is the worst time in the history of the planet to be cutting the humanities. These students are going to be voting. Among the humanities, religious studies more than any other in the South 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.

Kevin: It's rather political, but also a good plug for the humanities and using our brains. He makes a couple of digs at the South throughout this speech. We're considering a podcast on Bart's recent debate with Mike Licona on New Testament authorship. I haven't heard the entire debate yet, but we'll check it out. But sum up your thoughts on Bart's bye-bye bash, Bill.

Dr. William Lane Craig: Certainly, I second and endorse his advocacy of the humanities and the importance of critical thinking skills. But honestly, Kevin, I find it so ironic that it would be Bart Ehrman of all people saying that it teaches us how to construct arguments and evaluate evidence because this is one of his great weaknesses.

Look at his debate with me at the College of the Holy Cross on the resurrection of Jesus. He simply trots out the fallacious argument of David Hume against miracles. When I expose the error in this, he doesn't even understand it. He thinks I'm trying to use mathematics to prove the existence of God when, in fact, I'm exposing the demonstrative logical fallacy of his argument against miracles. So, while the humanities are important in teaching us to evaluate arguments and assess evidence, I fear that that is a skill that Bart has not yet mastered.