Justified True Belief

(●) The former fundamentalist who became the most widely read critic of the New Testament in the English-speaking world. + Walk into a general bookshop, find the shelf marked religion, and Bart Ehrman will usually be on it two or three times over. He has written or edited more than thirty books, six of which reached the New York Times bestseller list, and he did it with material that used to live only in seminary classrooms: which ancient copies of the New Testament say what, where the four Gospels tell the same story differently, and how a Galilean preacher came to be worshipped as God. He matters to Christians because he is the objection with a face. When a college student writes home to say that the Bible has been changed, or a friend at work says that nobody really knows what the New Testament originally said, the claim usually traces back to Ehrman: to one of his books, or to somebody who read one, or to a clip of a debate. He is also, by training, the real thing. His doctorate is from Princeton Theological Seminary under Bruce Metzger, the most respected American scholar of New Testament manuscripts in the twentieth century, and the two of them later revised Metzger’s standard textbook together. One fact is worth holding on to before anything else, because it does not fit the caricature in either direction. The scholar most often quoted to show that the Gospels cannot be trusted wrote an entire book to prove that Jesus of Nazareth really existed, and took a great deal of abuse from his own admirers for writing it.

(●) 1955 AD: Born in Lawrence, Kansas, into a churchgoing family whose religion asked very little of him. + Bart Denton Ehrman was born on 5 October 1955 in Lawrence, Kansas, a university town on the Kansas River. The family belonged to the Episcopal Church, and by his own account the arrangement was pleasant and undemanding: church on Sunday, an altar boy’s duties in the sanctuary, and nothing much said about any of it during the week. He has never described that childhood faith with contempt, which is worth noticing in a man who later left the faith altogether. He describes it the way people describe a home they moved out of. It was the religion of respectable Kansas, and it was not, in his telling, the sort of thing a boy would organize his life around.

(●) 1971 AD: At fifteen he was born again in a high school Bible club, and the mild religion became the whole of his life. + In his junior year of high school he started going to a Campus Life club, the high school arm of Youth for Christ, run by a young leader named Bruce whom Ehrman remembers as easy to like and impossible to ignore. There he was born again: the evangelical phrase, taken from Jesus’ words to Nicodemus in John 3, for a personal turning to Christ that a believer can usually date. Ehrman can date his. What followed was total. He moved from the Episcopal parish to Lawrence Bible Chapel, a Plymouth Brethren congregation, one of a movement of independent conservative assemblies that has no ordained clergy, and his parents followed him there. He learned to pray out loud, to lead Bible studies, and to hold what fundamentalists call the inerrancy of Scripture: the view that the Bible, in its original manuscripts, contains no error of any kind, historical or scientific as well as spiritual. He did not hold that view mildly. He held it the way a young man holds the thing he has just staked everything on, and everything that happened to him afterwards is a working out of what happens when that view meets the evidence.

(●) 1973 AD: He went to Moody Bible Institute to learn the Bible from people who believed every word of it. + Moody Bible Institute in Chicago was, and is, one of the flagship schools of American fundamentalism. Ehrman took its three-year diploma, in a place with rules against drinking, dancing, movies and card playing, where students memorized long passages of Scripture and were taught that the whole edifice of Christian faith rested on the Bible being without error. He looks back on it in two minds. It was, he has said, the ideal place for the passionate teenager he then was, and he is still grateful for the sheer immersion in the Bible it gave him; he has also called it three years of indoctrination rather than education, and he resents the sciences and languages nobody ever taught him. From Moody he transferred to Wheaton College, the evangelical liberal arts college in the suburbs west of Chicago, and took his bachelor’s degree in English literature there in 1978. He and a roommate from Moody took on the youth group at Trinity Evangelical Covenant Church in Oak Lawn, on the south side of the city, and he stayed with those young people for three years. At Wheaton he also did the thing that would eventually undo him, and he did it out of piety. He started learning Greek, because if every word of the New Testament was God’s word, then a serious Christian ought to read those words in the language they were written in rather than in somebody’s English rendering. That is the hinge of the whole life, and it is worth sitting with. The doctrine of inerrancy sent him looking for the exact words. Looking for the exact words sent him to the manuscripts. And the manuscripts, as he tells it, did not cooperate.

(●) 1978 AD: At Princeton, one line written on a term paper took his doctrine of Scripture apart. + Ehrman went from Wheaton to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he took a Master of Divinity in 1981 and a doctorate in 1985. His supervisor was Bruce Metzger, the dean of American textual criticism. Textual criticism is the discipline of comparing surviving handwritten copies of a document in order to work out, as nearly as possible, what the author actually wrote; for the New Testament it means comparing thousands of Greek manuscripts, none of them the author’s own copy. Under Metzger he wrote a dissertation on the Gospel text used by Didymus the Blind, a fourth-century Egyptian teacher, which is exactly the sort of unglamorous, painstaking work that makes a career in the field. He was also, in these years, a working churchman: when the seminary degree was done the Princeton Baptist Church asked him to fill the pulpit while it looked for a minister, and for a year he preached every Sunday morning, ran the Bible studies, and visited the sick in the hospital. The moment he says broke him came in a course with the professor Cullen Story, and the problem that did it was a very small one, of the sort that only matters if you have decided in advance that nothing in the Bible can be wrong. In Mark 2 Jesus is defending his hungry disciples, and he reminds his critics of the day David went into the house of God on the run and ate the consecrated bread, the loaves set aside for the priests. Mark 2:26 has him place that day "in the time of Abiathar the high priest," and the trouble is that 1 Samuel 21 puts the episode under Abiathar’s father Ahimelech. Ehrman wrote a long paper arguing that the Greek phrase need not mean what it appears to mean. It came back with a single line written at the end: "Maybe Mark just made a mistake." He thought about the footwork he had done to get around one small clause, and concluded that maybe Mark did. Once a single error was possible, inerrancy was gone, and with it the reason he had for treating every word as load-bearing. He did not stop being a Christian. He stopped being a fundamentalist, and became for the next twenty years or so a liberal Christian who no longer needed the Bible to be flawless.

(●) 1988 AD: He joined the faculty at Chapel Hill and built a reputation as a formidable lecturer and a serious technical scholar. + He taught for four years at Rutgers, finishing the doctorate along the way, and in 1988 he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he would teach for the next thirty-seven years. He chaired the religious studies department from 2000 to 2006, was named James A. Gray Distinguished Professor in 2003, and collected a shelf of the university’s teaching awards. Undergraduates who had never opened a Bible signed up for his introduction to the New Testament in numbers that filled lecture halls. The scholarship of these years is the part of his output that his critics respect most and his readers know least. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture in 1993 argued that some of the differences between manuscripts were made on purpose, by scribes taking sides in the church’s early fights about who Jesus was (T2). In 2003 he produced the two-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of the Apostolic Fathers, the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, with the Greek on one page and his English on the facing page: a standard reference that now sits on the shelves of a great many pastors who disagree with everything else he has written. In 2005 he and Metzger jointly revised Metzger’s The Text of the New Testament, the textbook the discipline had used for forty years.

(●) c. 2000 AD: He stopped believing in God, and the reason was suffering rather than manuscripts. + This is the point most often got wrong about him, and he has spent twenty years correcting it. Textual criticism did not make Bart Ehrman an unbeliever. It made him a liberal Christian, and he stayed one for years, going to church, reading the Bible, teaching students who assumed he was a believer because he was. What finished it was suffering. He could not reconcile the God he had been praying to with a world of famine, birth defects, and children dying in the night, and the biblical answers he taught professionally struck him one by one as answers that did not fit the case. Around 2000, in his mid-forties, he concluded that he simply did not believe there was a God of any sort. He set out the whole argument in God’s Problem in 2008 (T5). He calls himself both an agnostic and an atheist, and he draws the distinction carefully: agnosticism, he says, is a statement about knowledge, and atheism is a statement about belief. He does not claim to have shown there is no God. He claims not to know, and not to believe.

(●) 2005 AD: Misquoting Jesus turned a textual critic into a bestselling author, and he has argued in public ever since. + Nobody expected a trade book about scribal errors to sell. Misquoting Jesus did, in hundreds of thousands of copies, helped along by a spot on late-night television, and it put a subject that had been the property of a few dozen specialists into airport bookshops. What made it work was that Ehrman writes the way he lectures, in short scenes with a puzzle at the front of each one. The debates followed. He faced William Lane Craig on the resurrection at the College of the Holy Cross in March 2006, Daniel Wallace on the reliability of the New Testament text at Southern Methodist University in October 2011 before an auditorium of nearly fifteen hundred people, and, from the other flank entirely, Robert Price at Turner Hall in Milwaukee in October 2016 on whether Jesus existed at all. Price is a mythicist, which is to say he holds that there was never a man behind the story in the first place. In April 2012 he started a subscription blog on which he answers questions about the New Testament almost daily, and gives every penny of the membership money away: it had raised more than three million dollars for hunger and homelessness charities by 2025. He retired from teaching at Chapel Hill at the end of 2025 and kept writing. In March 2026 he published Love Thy Stranger, which argues that Jesus’ command to love people you do not know, unconditionally, and to prove it by looking after them, was new in the ancient world and reshaped the moral conscience of the West. It is not a Christian book, and its author is not a Christian. It is an unbeliever’s account of what the teaching of Jesus did to the world.

What He Taught

(T1) Nobody has the authors’ own copies of the New Testament, only copies of copies that disagree with each other. + Think about what happens when a letter is copied by hand. A parish secretary copies out a two-page notice for twelve churches; a few copies pick up a misspelling, one drops a line because the copyist’s eye jumped from one "and" to the next, and one helpful soul silently fixes what looks like a mistake in the original. Now imagine that going on for fourteen hundred years, in Greek, by candlelight, before anyone invented printing. That is the situation Ehrman describes. The autographs, the actual sheets Paul and Mark wrote on, are gone; what survives is some five thousand eight hundred catalogued Greek manuscripts plus ancient translations and quotations, and no two of them agree at every point. Each place where the wording differs is called a variant. Nobody has counted them all, and the estimates Ehrman reports from his own field run from two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand or more, against a New Testament of about one hundred and thirty-eight thousand words, which is where his most quoted sentence comes from. The observation itself is not controversial. Metzger taught it, every textual critic teaches it, and the modern translations print the more significant variants in their footnotes. What Christians dispute is the inference drawn from it. Does a large number of differences mean the original wording is beyond recovery, or is the number large precisely because the number of surviving copies is large?

(Q) "Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament." + Source: Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), Introduction, p. 10. The sentence that made the book famous, and the one his critics ask readers to look at twice. It is arithmetically true and it counts every difference alike, so a manuscript that spells John’s name with one letter more contributes to the total exactly as a manuscript that adds a whole sentence does.

(T2) Some scribes changed the wording on purpose, because they were parties in the church’s arguments about who Jesus was. + This is Ehrman’s own contribution to his field, and it is the work that made his name among scholars long before any general reader had heard of him. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993) argues that in the second and third centuries, while Christians were fighting about whether Jesus was truly God, truly man, or somehow adopted as God’s Son at his baptism, the men copying the texts were not sealed off in a back room. They were church members with opinions, and now and then a copyist nudged a phrase toward the reading his own side favoured. His examples are small and specific. At Luke 3:22 some manuscripts have the voice from heaven say "You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased," and others have it say "You are my Son, today I have begotten you," a wording that could be read as though the sonship began at the baptism. At Luke 22:43–44 the sweat like drops of blood in Gethsemane is missing from some early copies and present in others. Ehrman argues that in cases like these the direction of the change is not random: it runs toward whatever the winning party found safe. The claim is narrower than it sounds. He is not saying the church invented the New Testament; he is saying the copies carry fingerprints from the fights of the second century. Christian scholars have accepted a good deal of the method and contested particular cases, and the argument over whether a given variant is theological or accidental is exactly the kind of argument textual critics have with each other all the time.

(Q) "The New Testament manuscripts were not produced impersonally by machines capable of flawless reproduction. They were copied by hand, by living, breathing human beings who were deeply rooted in the conditions and controversies of their day." + Source: Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 1, p. 3. He asks the question in the next breath and answers it in the one after: did the scribes’ polemical contexts influence the way they transcribed their sacred Scriptures, and the burden of the study is that they did. Christological simply means having to do with the question of who Christ is: God, man, or both, and in what sense. The controversies he means are the ones that ran from the second century to Nicaea in 325.

(T3) Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet who expected God to end the present age within his own generation. + An apocalypticist, in the sense scholars use the word, is not somebody predicting the date of the world’s end on a placard. It is a first-century Jew who held a particular view of history: that the world had fallen under the control of evil powers, that this state of affairs was temporary, and that God was about to break in, judge, and set up his kingdom. Plenty of Jews thought this. The Dead Sea Scrolls, written by a community living in the Judean desert while all this was going on, are soaked in it, and so is John the Baptist. Ehrman’s case, argued at length in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (1999), is that Jesus belongs squarely in that company: he begins as a follower of an apocalyptic preacher, John, and after his death his followers form an apocalyptic community expecting the end. Sayings like "this generation will not pass away until all these things take place" (Mark 13:30) are, on this reading, meant exactly as they sound, and they did not come true. Where this lands is not where either side expects. It cuts hard against the liberal picture of Jesus as a gentle teacher of timeless ethics, which is why Ehrman spends as much time arguing with other critics as with Christians. It also puts him closer to orthodox Christianity than his readers expect on one point: he holds that the kingdom Jesus preached was a real, coming, public act of God, not a metaphor for inward peace. Where Christians part company is over whether Jesus was wrong about the timing, which turns on how Mark 13 and its parallels are read, and Christian scholars have answered him at length there.

(Q) "Jesus thought that the history of the world would come to a screeching halt, that God would intervene in the affairs of this planet, overthrow the forces of evil in a cosmic act of judgment, and establish his Utopian Kingdom here on earth. And this was to happen within Jesus’ own generation." + Source: Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 1, "The End of History as We Know It," p. 3. He is stating his thesis on the third page of the book, before any of the evidence, so that a reader knows what is coming. He calls it a bold thesis and says he will need time to develop it properly. The first sentence is very close to what the Nicene Creed says Christians expect. The second is where the disagreement lives.

(T4) Jesus did not call himself God, and his followers reached that conclusion only after the crucifixion. + Read Mark straight through one evening and John straight through the next, and you will notice what every attentive reader of the Gospels notices. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus does not go about saying "I am God." In John he says things like "before Abraham was, I am" and "I and the Father are one." Since Mark is on the standard scholarly dating the earliest Gospel and John the latest, Ehrman reads that difference as a development stretched over roughly sixty years, and he built How Jesus Became God (2014) around it. Of everything he has written, this is the argument that matters most for Christian faith. His account of the mechanism runs like this. The disciples became convinced that Jesus had been raised; they concluded from that that God had exalted him to heaven; and then, decade by decade, they kept moving the moment of that exaltation earlier in the story. First he was made Lord at the resurrection. Then, in later reflection, at his baptism. Then at his conception. Then, by the time of John, there was no moment left to find, because he was the eternal Word who had always been with God. Christology, the church’s teaching about who Christ is, is on this account something that grew. There is a real observation underneath all of that, and it should be granted before anything else is said. The New Testament writers do say new things about Jesus in different ways, and the vocabulary of the fourth-century creeds is not the vocabulary of Mark. The question is whether the earliest datable material shows the low starting point the theory requires.

(Q) "During his lifetime, Jesus himself didn’t call himself God and didn’t consider himself God." + Source: Bart D. Ehrman, interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, 7 April 2014, "If Jesus Never Called Himself God, How Did He Become One?", on the publication of How Jesus Became God. He finishes the sentence by saying that none of his disciples had any inkling at all that he was God. Put beside the confession of Thomas in the upper room, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28), the size of the claim is clear enough.

(T5) The Bible’s answers to suffering do not work, and that is why he stopped believing. + God’s Problem (2008) is the most personal book he has written, and Christians who want to understand him should start there rather than with the manuscripts. He goes through the answers the biblical writers give to suffering, one at a time, and finds that each of them covers some of the ground and then stops. The prophets say that suffering is punishment for sin, which is an answer of a sort until you are standing beside an infant born with a heart defect. Job’s friends say much the same thing at length, and the book ends with God rebuking them for it. Other writers trace suffering to human free will, which explains a great deal about war and nothing at all about a drought. The apocalyptic writers say that God will put it right at the end, and that, Ehrman answers, is a promise rather than an explanation. What moves the book is not the argument but the arithmetic he keeps putting in front of the reader: the number of children who die of hunger and preventable disease in a single day, in a world where he had been taught that God feeds the sparrows. He does not sneer at believers in it. He writes as someone reporting a bereavement. Theodicy is the technical name for what he is rejecting: an attempt to show how a God who is both good and almighty can be squared with the suffering that exists. Ehrman’s complaint is not that the theodicies are complicated. It is that when he laid them alongside the world, they stopped persuading him, and he could not go on saying words he no longer believed.

(Q) "The problem of suffering has haunted me for a very long time. It was what made me begin to think about religion when I was young, and it was what led me to question my faith when I was older. Ultimately, it was the reason I lost my faith." + Source: Bart D. Ehrman, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question, Why We Suffer (HarperOne, 2008), ch. 1, "Suffering and a Crisis of Faith." Worth reading twice by anyone who assumes the manuscripts did it. He says plainly, here and elsewhere, that textual criticism made him a different kind of Christian and that suffering made him an unbeliever.

(Q) "But the reality is that whatever else you may think about Jesus, he certainly did exist." + Source: Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (HarperOne, 2012), Introduction. The next sentence says that this is what the book will set out to demonstrate. Mythicism is the claim that Jesus of Nazareth never lived and was invented, in the way the god Mithras was invented. It is popular online and holds essentially no ground among historians of antiquity, Christian or not, and in 2012 Ehrman wrote a book saying so at length. A good many of his readers were furious. He has not moved.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The textual critics answered him with the manuscripts, and on the decisive point he agrees with them. + The most sustained reply came from Daniel Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary, who founded the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts to photograph the surviving Greek copies and put the images where anyone can check them. His answer to the four hundred thousand variants is to sort them. The overwhelming majority are spelling, word order that does not change the sense, and obvious slips; on his count, less than one percent are both meaningful and viable, meaning that they could change what a passage says and have a genuine claim to be original. The two men debated it face to face at Southern Methodist University on 1 October 2011, before nearly fifteen hundred people, which the organizers believed was the largest crowd a debate about New Testament manuscripts had ever drawn. The striking thing is what Ehrman himself has said in print about the point that worries ordinary Christians most. In an interview printed as an appendix to the paperback of Misquoting Jesus, he wrote that the position he argues for there does not actually stand at odds with Metzger’s view that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants, and that most variants have no bearing at all on what a passage means. That exchange sits at the back of the book rather than in the main text, and it is easily missed. There is a second thing worth noticing, and it is about what he does rather than what he says. A scholar who believed the wording of the New Testament had been lost beyond recovery would not spend a career reconstructing it. Ehrman has edited Greek texts, translated the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library, and revised with Metzger the standard textbook on how the New Testament text is restored.

(†) The historians answered his account of how Jesus became God, and a rebuttal book reached the shops the same week his did. + In 2014 five New Testament scholars, Michael Bird, Craig Evans, Simon Gathercole, Charles Hill and Chris Tilling, published How God Became Jesus as a chapter-by-chapter answer to How Jesus Became God. It appeared simultaneously, which was possible because Ehrman’s publisher and theirs belong to the same parent company. A general reader could buy both books in one visit and read the argument from both sides, which is a rarer thing than it ought to be. They were building on two decades of work that had already run the other way. Larry Hurtado of Edinburgh, in One God, One Lord and then Lord Jesus Christ (2003), argued that devotion to Jesus alongside God the Father shows up at the earliest observable stage of the movement, among Jewish believers who were monotheists to their fingertips, and that a development that fast is better described as an explosion than as a slow evolution. Richard Bauckham of St Andrews argued in God Crucified (1998) that the New Testament writers do not smuggle Jesus into the Godhead by degrees; they place him inside the identity of the one God of Israel from the start, doing what only God does. The evidence they point to is early by anyone’s dating, and it is worth taking one piece at a time. In one letter Paul quotes what most scholars take to be a hymn or a confession older than the letter carrying it, which is to say that the words were already being sung or recited by somebody before he wrote them down: Christ "though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant" (Philippians 2:6–7). In another he takes the Shema, the Jewish confession that God is one, which a devout Jew recited morning and evening, and puts Jesus inside it: "one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist" (1 Corinthians 8:6). And at the end of that same letter he lets a prayer stand in Aramaic, the everyday language of Jesus and of Galilee, without stopping to translate it: Marana tha, "Our Lord, come!" (1 Corinthians 16:22). Somebody had been praying those words before anyone thought to write them in Greek, which means that the Aramaic-speaking church, the earliest church there was, was already praying to Jesus.

(†) Christians have found him useful in two places he did not intend, and one of them is the historical Jesus himself. + When somebody online insists that Jesus of Nazareth is a myth assembled out of dying-and-rising gods, the citation an apologist reaches for is usually not a Christian at all. It is Did Jesus Exist? (2012), in which the best-known critic of the New Testament in the English-speaking world lays out the evidence for a crucified Galilean: Paul, who says he met the man’s brother; the independent Gospel sources; the embarrassment of a messiah executed as a criminal; and the plain fact that no serious historian of antiquity doubts it. Ehrman wrote it because he thought the mythicists were doing bad history and giving unbelief a bad name, and he paid for it in angry email. His editions serve the church in a quieter way. The Loeb Apostolic Fathers put Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp and the Didache into readable English beside the Greek, and it is the edition many seminaries assign. His readers of non-canonical texts have done the same for the writings that did not make it into the New Testament, and a Christian who wants to know why the church rejected the Gospel of Thomas is better served by reading it than by being told about it. Then there is the late turn. Love Thy Stranger (2026) argues that the ancient world took it for granted that you looked after your own, and that the command to love the stranger you will never see again, and to prove it by feeding and nursing him, entered Western moral life through the teaching of Jesus and the churches that carried it. Christians have said that for centuries. It carries a different weight coming from a man who has spent twenty years saying he does not believe a word of the theology.

(†) Where his popular arguments outrun his own scholarship: the variants, the christology, and the argument from suffering. + The criticism worth making of Ehrman is not that he is a bad scholar. It is that the trade books say something louder than the technical work will carry, and the gap is his own, made in his own pages. - The variants. The line about there being more differences among the manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament is true, and it is measured the wrong way. The count rises with the number of surviving copies, so the tradition with the most manuscripts on earth is guaranteed the largest variant total, and the great majority of those differences are spelling and word order. Ehrman knows this and says it in the appendix to his own book, where he grants that essential Christian beliefs are not affected. A reader who has only the main text will not learn it. - The christology. The theory needs a low starting point and a slow climb, but the earliest datable material is the highest. Philippians 2 and 1 Corinthians 8:6 are older than the letters that carry them, and both are earlier than any Gospel; the Aramaic prayer of 1 Corinthians 16:22 is earlier still. A development that is already complete in the first generation is not the kind of development the theory describes, which is the burden of Hurtado’s and Bauckham’s work. - The suffering. God’s Problem shows that the biblical writers give several answers to suffering and that no one of them covers every case, which is true and which the Bible itself seems to know: the book of Job exists to say that the tidy answer is wrong. What Scripture offers at the end of Job is not an explanation but a question back, "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" (Job 38:4), and what it offers at the centre of the New Testament is not an argument but a crucifixion. Ehrman requires that a good God have reasons a human being could inspect. That is a premise, and it is the one doing the work. None of this touches his character, and it should not. He has been honest about his own story, generous to opponents who deal with him squarely, and consistent in refusing to say more than he thinks the evidence allows, which is exactly why the mythicists cannot use him. The disagreement is with the arguments, at their strongest, and that is the way he has always asked to be answered.