Who Is Bart D. Ehrman’s Wife?

In Forged, Ehrman posits some New Testament books are literary forgeries and shows how widely forgery was practiced by early Christian writers—and how it was condemned in the ancient world as fraudulent and illicit. His scholarly book, Forgery and Counterforgery, is an advanced look at the practice of forgery in the NT and early Christian literature. It makes a case for considering falsely attributed or pseudepigraphic books in the New Testament and early Christian literature “forgery”, looks at why certain New Testament and early Christian works are considered forged, and describes the broader phenomenon of pseudepigraphy in the Greco-Roman world.

The 2014 release of How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee examines the historical Jesus, who according to Ehrman neither thought of himself as God nor claimed to be God, and proffers how he came to be thought of as the incarnation of God himself.

Gary Kamiya states in Salon that “Ehrman’s scholarly standing did not soothe the evangelical Christians who were outraged by Misquoting Jesus. Angered by what they took to be the book’s subversive import, they attacked it as exaggerated, unfair and lacking a devotional tone. No fewer than three books were published in response to Ehrman’s tome”. In 2014, Zondervan published How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature: A Response to Bart D. Ehrman as a planned companion volume to Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God. The contributing authors—including Michael F. Bird, Craig A. Evans, and Simon Gathercole—present Ehrman as “prone to profound confusion, botched readings and scholarly fictions.” Bird writes, “For conservative Christians, Ehrman is a bit of a bogeyman, the Prof. Moriarty of biblical studies, constantly pressing an attack on their long-held beliefs about God, Jesus, and the Bible…. For secularists, the emerging generation of ‘nones’ (who claim no religion, even if they are not committed to atheism or agnosticism), Ehrman is a godsend.”

In 2012, Ehrman published Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, defending the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth in contrast to the mythicist theory that Jesus is an entirely fictitious being.

Ehrman has been the recipient of the 2009 J. W. Pope “Spirit of Inquiry” Teaching Award, the 1993 UNC Undergraduate Student Teaching Award, the 1994 Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement, and the Bowman and Gordon Gray Award for excellence in teaching.

In 2006 he appeared on The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, to promote his book Misquoting Jesus, and in 2009 reappeared on The Colbert Report with the release of Jesus, Interrupted. Ehrman has appeared on the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel, Findy Channel, A&E, Dateline NBC, CNN, and NPR’s Fresh Air and his writings have been featured in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.

Ehrman has taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1988, after four years of teaching at Rutgers University. At UNC he has served as both the Director of Graduate Studies and the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies. He was the recipient of the 2009 J. W. Pope “Spirit of Inquiry” Teaching Award, the 1993 UNC Undergraduate Student Teaching Award, the 1994 Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement, and the Bowman and Gordon Gray Award for excellence in teaching.

Ehrman grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, and attended Lawrence High School, where he was on the state champion debate team in 1973. He began studying the Bible, Biblical theology and Biblical languages at Moody Bible Institute, where he earned the school’s three-year diploma in 1976. He is a 1978 graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois, where he received his bachelor’s degree. He received his Ph.D. (in 1985) and M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studied textual criticism of the Bible, development of the New Testament canon and New Testament apocrypha under Bruce Metzger. Both baccalaureate and doctorate were conferred magna cum laude.

Bart Denton Ehrman (/b ɑː r t ˈ ɜːr m ə n / ; born October 5, 1955) is an American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, the origins and development of early Christianity. He has written and edited 30 books, including three college textbooks. He has also authored six New York Times bestsellers. He is currently the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.