Meet Bart Ehrman: A One-Man God Fraud Squad

Nearly half of the New Testament is a forgery, according to a world-renowned Bible scholar whose new book fingering the forgers is making evangelical Christians as mad as — well, hell.

"Bart Ehrman has waged war on Christianity for years. This is just his latest salvo," snaps a FreeRepublic commenter. "Bart himself is a forgery. More of his usual tragic, groundless, infantile, bigoted narcissism enslaved to the father of lies, mammon ... a willful subtle prevaricator ... a disgusting, arrogant hack. God have mercy on his benighted soul," rages another at the Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth blog.

Ehrman is used to it. The University of North Carolina religious studies professor stoked evangelical ire with his previous bestsellers The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed  and Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. He's doing it again with Forged: Writing in the Name of God — Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (HarperOne, 2011).

"When Bart D. Ehrman and all his so called 'scholar' friends are long gone, Jesus Christ will still be the King of Kings and Lord of Lords to whom EVERY KNEE will one day bow. Friends — repent," pleads a Daily Mail commenter.

Ehrman knows where they're coming from. He used to be one of them.

As an undergrad at Chicago's Moody Bible Institute in the mid-1970s, Ehrman was "an extremely zealous, rigorous, pious (self-righteous)" evangelical who followed the school's draconian rules — no smoking, drinking, card-playing, dancing, movies, or beards — because Bible verses seemed to support them. Unlike most college students, unlike nearly all young Americans, Moody students didn't question authority.

When you take the Bible literally, you don't subvert dominant paradigms.

Such bullet-proof belief "was comforting," Ehrman says now, "because we thought we had a corner on the truth and that we were right and everybody else was wrong. And these were eternal truths, so they were going to bring us eternal life and everybody else was going to hell. It's very comforting to think you're always right."

Studying for his PhD a few years later at Princeton Theological Seminary, poring over each part of the New Testament in its original Koine Greek, the born-again young scholar remained "passionate about my studies and the truth that I could find." But what he found instead were errors. Contradictions. Self-defeating arguments. Historical inaccuracies. And worse.

"The New Testament (not to mention the Old Testament, where the problems are even more severe) was chock full of discrepancies. ... I wrestled with these problems, I prayed about them. ... Eventually I came to realize that the Bible not only contains untruths or accidental mistakes. It also contains what almost anyone today would call lies."

Lies. Not just fact-twisting fabrications but the composition of entire books by obscure authors who claimed to be the Apostles Peter and Paul and other spiritual celebrities but weren't.

According to Ehrman, individuals falsely claiming to be Paul wrote Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, and the Epistles to Timothy and Titus. Equally bogus, Ehrman charges, is the premise that the Apostle Peter wrote the Epistles of Peter or anything else in the Bible — or anywhere, ever, because as a poor hick fisherman raised in rural Palestine, Peter was almost certainly illiterate.

Researchers estimate the literacy rate of Roman-era Palestine at only 3 percent. Ehrman surmises that in rural areas, where most residents "would scarcely ever even see a written text," it might have been as low as 1 percent.