About the Author: Bart D. Ehrman

* Ph.D. Princeton Theological Seminary (magna cum laude), 1985 * M.Div. Princeton Theological Seminary, 1981 * B.A. Wheaton College, Illinois (magna cum laude), 1978 Principal Areas of Research Interest: New Testament Interpretation; History of Ancient Christianity (first three centuries), especially Orthodoxy and Heresy, Formation of the Canon, NT Manuscript Tradition, Historical Jesus, and Apostolic Fathers;Secondary Areas of Interest: Jewish-Christian Relations in Antiquity; Greco-Roman Religions; Christianization of the Roman World.Bart Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He came to UNC in 1988, after four years of teaching at Rutgers University.Prof. Ehrman completed his M.Div. and Ph.D. degrees at Princeton Seminary, where his 1985 doctoral dissertation was awarded magna cum laude. Since then he has published extensively in the fields of New Testament and Early Christianity, having written or edited nineteen books, numerous articles, and dozens of book reviews. Among his most recent books are a college-level textbook on the New Testament, two anthologies of early Christian writings, a study of the historical Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet (Oxford Univesity Press), and a Greek-English Edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press).Prof. Ehrman has served as President of the Southeast Region of the Society of Biblical literature, chair of the New Testament textual criticism section of the Society, book review editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature, and editor of the monograph series The New Testament in the Greek Fathers (Scholars Press). He currently serves as co-editor of the series New Testament Tools and Studies (E. J. Brill) and on several other editorial boards for monographs in the field.Winner of numerous university awards and grants, Prof. Ehrman is the recipient of 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.

  • Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

    By Published On: June 23, 2023

    A “humane, thoughtful, and intelligent” (The New York Times Book Review) bestselling Biblical scholar reveals why our popular understanding of the Apocalypse is all wrong- and why that matters.

  • Forged: Writing in the Name of God–Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are

    By Published On: October 9, 2011

    Ehrman's Forged delivers a stunning explication of one of the most substantial yet least discussed problems confronting the world of biblical scholarship.

  • The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of he New Testament

    By Published On: October 1, 2010

    In a study that explores the close relationship between the social history of early Christianity and the textual tradition of the emerging New Testament, Ehrman examines how early struggles between Christian "heresy" and "orthodoxy" affected the transmission of the documents over which, in part, the debates were waged. His thesis is that proto-orthodox scribes of the second and third centuries occasionally altered their sacred texts for polemical reasons…

  • God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer

    By Published On: September 30, 2010

    In times of questioning and despair, people often quote the Bible to provide answers. Surprisingly, though, the Bible does not have one answer but many "answers" that often contradict one another. Consider these competing explanations for suffering put forth by various biblical writers: * The prophets: suffering is a punishment for sin * The book of Job, which offers two different answers: suffering is a test, and you will be rewarded later for passing it; and suffering is beyond comprehension, since we are just human beings and God, after all, is God * Ecclesiastes: suffering is the nature of things, so just accept it * All apocalyptic texts in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament: God will eventually make right all that is wrong with the world For renowned Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, the question of why there is so much suffering in the world is more than a haunting thought. Ehrman's inability to reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of real life led the former pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church to reject Christianity. In God's Problem, Ehrman discusses his personal anguish upon discovering the Bible's contradictory explanations for suffering and invites all people of faith - or no faith - to confront their deepest questions about how God engages the world and each of us.