Bart D. Ehrman Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Bart D. Ehrman
Bart D. Ehrman was born in Lawrence, Kansas on October 5, 1955. He is a James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He came to UNC in the year 1988, after teaching for four years at Rutgers University. While at UNC he has served as both the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and the Director of Graduate Studies.

He is a graduate of Wheaton College (Illinois) got both his PhD and Masters of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary, where his doctoral dissertation was awarded magna cum laude. Since that time, he has published rather extensively in the fields of Early Christianity and New Testament, having edited or written over twenty books, dozens of book reviews, and many scholarly articles.

His work has been featured in the New Yorker, Time, the Washington Post, as well as other print media. Bart has appeared on NBC’s Dateline, CNN, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The History Channel, as well as other top media outlets.

Among Bart’s fields of scholarly expertise include: the early Christian apocrypha, the historical Jesus, the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, and the apostolic fathers.

Bart has won various university grants and awards, like the 1994 Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement, the 1993 UNC Undergraduate Student Teaching Award, and the Bowman and Gordon Gray Award for his excellence in teaching.

Bart is married to Sarah Beckwith (PhD, King’s College London), the Marcello Lotti Professor of English at Duke University. Together, they have a son and a daughter, Kelly and Derek.

“Misquoting Jesus” is one of Bart’s books and was released in the year 2005. The popular perception of the Bible being a divinely perfect book gets scant support from Bart, that sees in Holy Writ ample evidence of ecclesiastical politics and human fallibility. Even though he is schooled in evangelical literalism, he has come to regard his much earlier faith in the inerrant inspiration of the Bible as being misguided, since the original texts have vanished and the extant texts available don’t agree with each other.

Most of the textual discrepancies, Bart acknowledges, don’t matter much, however, some do profoundly affect religious doctrine. To assess just how ignorant or theologically manipulative scribes could have changed the biblical text, modern scholars have developed procedures for comparing diverging texts.

Bart, in language accessible to nonspecialists, explains all of these procedures and their results. He further explains why textual criticism has frequently sparked some intense controversy, particularly among scripture-alone Protestants.

In discounting not just the authenticity of existing manuscripts but the inspiration of the original writers, Bart is sure to divide his readers deeply. Even though he addresses quite a popular audience, he undercuts the highly religious attitudes that have made the Bible the popular book it is. Still, this is quite the useful overview for biblical history collections.

“God’s Problem” is one of Bart’s books and was released in the year 2008. Here, Bart turns from his typical historical-critical concerns to theological consideration of the problem of suffering. Namely, if God is all powerful and all-loving, how is it possible that suffering is able to exist?

Bart writes in an engaging and clear style, bringing reason and personal reflection to bear on the academically sound readings of biblical perspectives on suffering, from the New and Old Testament. Ultimately, the book is quite a personal statement that is sure to anger some and resonate with others. Most importantly, it is going to provoke some mature consideration of this highly important question.

The book presents the problem of suffering, not to convert anybody to atheism, in a way that ought to challenge somebody’s faith. Bart writes in a readable way, and shows clarity in his thoughts and some intellectual rigor. He goes in-depth look at the text, particularly for the Book of Revelations and the Book of Job. Some found they liked this style of writing and analysis with regard to religion, as it doesn’t presume to know things with fake evidence to back it up.

“Forged: Writing in the Name of God” is one of Bart’s books and was released in the year 2011. It is often stated, even by those critical scholars that should know better, that “writing in the name of somebody else” was widely accepted in the days in antiquity. However Bart calls it what it was. Literary forgery, a practice that was just as scandalous at that time as it is now.

In this book, Bart’s fresh and original research takes the readers back to the ancient world. Here, forgeries were used as weapons by some unknown authors to fend off attacks to their faith in order to establish their church. So, if many of the books found in the Bible were not actually written by Jesus’ inner circle, but actually by writers who lived decades later, with their own agendas in rival communities, what does that do to the Scripture’s authority?

“How Jesus Became God” is one of Bart’s books and was released in the year 2014. In this book, which took eight years to write and research, leading Bible scholar Bart D. Ehrman explores how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters in rural Galilee, crucified for crimes against the state wound up becoming to be thought of as being equal with the one God Almighty Creator of everything.

Bart sketches Jesus’ going from a human prophet into the Son of God exalted to divine status during his resurrection. Only when a fraction of Jesus’ followers had visions of him after he died, alive once more, did anybody come to think that he, prophet from Galilee, was God. What they meant by that wasn’t at all what people mean today.

Bart, as a historian, rather than a believer, answers these questions: How did Jesus’ transformation happen? How did he go from being a Jewish prophet and become God? The dramatic shifts over the course of history reveal not just why Jesus’ followers started claiming he was God, but also how they came to understand these claims in different ways.

One Response to “Bart D. Ehrman”

1. Loretta King: 1 year ago

   Dr. Ehrman, Thank you for your research and your books. I just finished listening to “Jesus Interrupted” and have read “Lost Christianities”, “How Jesus became God”, “Misquoting Jesus” and perhaps one or two others in the past. I have been a church organist for seventy-one years, starting at fourteen. Methodist, Reformed (United Church of Christ), Presbyterian, Episcopal, Roman Catholic, and for the last fifty years of this career, Christian Science. I consider this last one to be the least interested in Biblical research of those I have known. Over the past few years, I’ve written to several prominent Christian Science practitioners and also to the Mary Baker Library in Boston with questions. The replies have been totally unsatisfactory. Thank you for your openness and your sanity. It is gratifying and refreshing. Loretta King

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