Dr. James White Exposes Bart Ehrman's Biblical Fallacies

Bart Ehrman, Apollonius of Tyana, and the Popular Attack on Jesus

Well, we're going to be discussing Bart Ehrman, and we're doing it as an interview, which is a little different format for both of us, but we've done it a couple of times. But anyway, very good to have you with us.

Bart Ehrman is, as we heard last night, the leading English-speaking critic of the Bible. He often starts his classes with a story of what he describes as a remarkable man who lived 2 ,000 years ago.

Even before his birth, his mother was told that she would not be having a normal child, but rather an angelic visitor supposedly told her that the child she would conceive would be divine. Birth would be accompanied by miraculous signs and wonders.

He was religiously precocious. At a young age, as an adult, he became an itinerant preacher, had a number of disciples, he healed the sick, he raised the dead. Ehrman gives it a lot more pause and drama.

He tells that he was brought up on charges by the Roman authorities, and even after he left this world, his followers claimed he had ascended to heaven and they had seen him. And then Ehrman takes the covering off and shows you he's not really talking about Jesus, he's talking about Apollonius of Tiana.

He smirks. And he basically tries to portray Jesus as just one more supposed miracle worker of antiquity. James, is that a fair comparison?

It's interesting. My first exposure to the Apollonius story actually was from Robert Price, who is a mythicist. Former Southern Baptist? Southern Seminogram? That doesn't ring a bell with me, but... Former evangelical, at least.

I think so, yes. Very interesting fellow. We debated in 2010 in Florida. Mythicist is a person who doesn't believe that Jesus actually existed. Now it's interesting that Ehrman mocks mythicists because he feels that they're completely out of line.

But that was the first place that I had actually heard this story. And you'll hear it in many, many different contexts, very popular in community colleges and things like that to present the Apollonius story.

Of course, they always present it with a tremendous spin to it. They don't tell you the differences, the major massive differences that exist in regards to the sources that are used, the fact that the only source for Apollonius actually comes from someone who's on the payroll of the Roman Empire that's seeking to discredit Christianity at that time anyways, and that you don't have multiple sources.

You don't have Matthew, Mark, Luke. Of course, Bart Ehrman would argue that you don't really have Matthew, Mark, and Luke either, but for different reasons. And so, Bart and... I want to step back just a second and point out that from my perspective, Dr. Ehrman is a brilliant guy.

He's very, very sharp. He rarely gets his facts wrong. It's the context in which he places them and the interpretive grid that he utilizes for them that's the issue. But Bart Ehrman is an apostate. Now, people hear that term, they're like, oh, you're being mean, you're being mean-spirited, but apostate has a specific meaning to it.

Bart Ehrman went to...made a profession of faith as a teenager, went to Moody Bible Institute, and then to Wheaton College, and from Wheaton went to Princeton. And somewhere along that line, lost whatever professed faith that he had had.

And he's given different reasons for why. His official reason is not problems in the Bible, though he goes back to that a lot. His official published reason is the problem of evil. And he actually did a debate with a friend of mine on that subject a number of years ago, the issue of the problem of evil.

I know some people who knew Ehrman at Moody, and they have said that they're really surprised because he showed no interest in theology at all. He was rather quiet in all the classes, didn't really do all that well, didn't show any interest in theological dialogue or things like that.

And so, when he got to Princeton, he was Bruce Metzger's last doctoral student before Metzger retired from having doctoral students, and unfortunately became co-author with Metzger of Metzger's work on New Testament textual criticism.

And so, from, I believe, the fourth edition of that work onward, Metzger is involved, which is why I've always used the third edition. But he did his PhD, I'm one of the only people on the planet that I know that's actually read Bart Ehrman's PhD.

It was on the development of the early Proto-Alexandrian text type in one particular Egyptian writer. And, again, if you're not familiar with the educational system in the West, you have to find and convince a committee that your dissertation topic will be, will add to human, will add to human knowledge and scholarly knowledge.

And so, it's difficult for you to, it's difficult, sadly, to do PhD work on orthodoxy because we've been doing orthodoxy for a long time. And so, the tendency is to come up with some new take. Now, in the field of textual criticism, that's not nearly as much of a big deal because there's so much that could be done that isn't overly relevant to the issue of orthodoxy one way or the other.

It was a scholarly work. It was well done. It's very dated and completely outdated, to be perfectly honest with you. And I think Ehrman would probably admit that. But the point is, he can do sound scholarship.

But he has, if you step back just a second, you will see there is a scholarly Bart Ehrman and then there's a popular Bart Ehrman. And unfortunately, the way that you will be impacted and the way your children will be impacted, my daughter was impacted by this, will be by the popular Bart Ehrman, not by the scholarly Bart Ehrman.

Many of the professors at schools such as this will read Jesus Interrupted or Misquoting Jesus or so on and so forth. And since they don't have the scholarly background in textual criticism, that's as far as they'll go.

And so they're getting the popularized version rather than the more in-depth stuff that he's done in some of these areas. Though, by the way, I will mention, it's been at least 10 years now since Ehrman has said he's no longer involved in the textual critical area at all.

He's writing on broad subjects of Christian history. But you'll see the two kinds of Bart Ehrman. And then if you just back up and you look at the topics that he's written on popularly, all of a sudden, it certainly strikes me very clearly, he has for many, many years now been providing an apologetic for his apostasy.

That is, it's his intention to provide the broadest, deepest foundation for unbelief because that's what he's done. He has become an unbeliever. And so he starts off with questioning the transmission of the text.

And then the next book will be the authorship. So, for example, Ehrman...I'm sorry, I'm going on forever. But Ehrman has what is called a truncated Pauline canon. What does that mean? Well, we may argue about whether Paul wrote Hebrews, but we don't argue about whether he wrote 1 Timothy and Titus.

But you go to the majority of religious institutions in the West, and they don't believe that Paul wrote the pastoral epistles. They are 2nd century writings. And for Ehrman, Paul only wrote seven letters.

So books like Ephesians and Colossians are actually forgeries. So he has a book called Forgery, and where he presents that argumentation of truncating the Pauline corpus. So you question how it's been transmitted, who wrote it.

Then he did a whole book on memory. Would it even be possible 40, 50 years down the line for accurate oral accounts to be written down as the gospels would be written down? Because of course he would be taking, as is very popular, a much later date for the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Normally post -70, I guess I'm going to have to stick this in a pocket, post -70 AD as the dates up into the 80s and 90s. And so the idea being, he does an entire book just on the idea that no one could have clear memory recollection for that long.

And so what you're seeing is this very planned out attack on the foundations and on the very things, let's be honest, the vast majority of evangelical churches, no one's talking about these things. We do take for granted the accuracy of the text and the authorship of the text.

And we rarely, rarely have discussions about it. And in fact, to be honest with you, I know that I have been criticized many times in many different contexts for raising issues in sermons that people find uncomfortable.

And the problem is, where else are you going to raise these issues? If you don't do it in the context of faith, it's got to be done in the context of unbelief. And we tend to send our young people off into the university system without ever having challenged them and given them solid answers within that context.

And they run into some disciple of Bart Ehrman and were stunned that they're coming back going, well, I'm not really sure we can really believe the Bible, Dad. Why should we be stunned? We didn't deal with it when we needed to be dealing with it.

We thought that when you have teenagers, as long as you provide enough pizza and pop, everything's going to be fine. But that's not the way it works. And so, very plainly to me, Bart Ehrman has been living in the light of his denial of his faith for many, many years now.

And in 2009, I had the opportunity of doing a debate with Bart Ehrman in Florida. He initially agreed to a different topic. He initially agreed to deal with a very specific topic as to the accuracy of textual criticism.

And then we got only about two months out, he contacts us and says, no, no, no, no, no. The topic of the debate will be misquoting Jesus, because that was the title of his book. And he was very condescending, not a nice person to talk to, very dismissive of a believing Christian.

I've read a number of articles from people who have tried to work with him within scholarship and have been bullied by him. He's fairly well-known for that type of thing. So when we did the debate, I saw him in the bar at the hotel we were staying at.

And so I went over and introduced myself, and he was very cool. I invited him to come to the presentations I was doing the next day, where I was going to be talking about some of his favorite texts that he loves.

He talks about them all the time. Certain textual variants, for example, in the Gospel of Mark, there's a textual variant where there's a leper that comes to Jesus. And in a few manuscripts, in the vast majority of manuscripts, it says Jesus looked upon him with compassion.

But in a couple of manuscripts, it says Jesus looked on him with anger. And he makes a big, big, big deal about this. And then in Hebrews chapter 2, there's a textual variant where the vast majority of manuscripts say, by the grace of God, which is khoros in Greek, and a few manuscripts say khoros, one letter difference, but with, apart from, or without God.

And so in Hebrews, it would be like Jesus was abandoned by God when he died on the cross. He makes big, big, big, huge presentations on this. And so I invited him to come. I was going to be dealing with those texts.

And of course, he didn't bother to come because people, from his perspective, do not believe that conservatives have anything meaningful to say whatsoever. And so we did the debate. You can watch the debate today online.

I play a little portion of it last night. I'm not sure if you could hear it from the cross-examination. But we went toe-to-toe, as I expected that we would. And when the debate was made available, of course, he was provided, as we do with all of our debates, he was provided with an unedited master to do with as he pleased.

And for years, he never did anything with that debate. The only version of it that was out was ours. Finally, he put it out on his YouTube channel. And the only thing I've heard from Bart Ehrman since 2009 was the comment that he made.

He made a very short description of the video. And all he said was, this wasn't my best debate. Now, for Bart Ehrman, that was as close as you're going to get to an admission of anything as you're ever going to hear, okay?

This wasn't my best debate. It was fascinating because I knew he walked into that room and the PowerPoint presentation he made was the exact same PowerPoint presentation he had made about eight months earlier in debating Dan Wallace, so much so that he had not even fixed the typographical errors that had been discussed in the previous debate, but were still there.

So Bart is not overly concerned about our response to him. I'm not sure exactly why he does what he does outside of those writing projects being very clearly... I don't know if it's a cathartic thing.

I don't know if it's the Romans thing that when you're involved in sin, you invite other people to be involved with it with you. I don't know. But the one thing that I was very struck with in my brief personal interactions with him during the debate, before the debate, he is not a happy man.

He is not a fulfilled man. He does try to give money to charities. I think there's probably a reason for that, but he's not a happy man. And the number of people whose faith he has been instrumental in destroying, or the number of people that he has confirmed in their unbelief, I can tell you that in doing debates with Muslims, Bart Ehrman is their favorite author by a long shot.

I did a debate at Duke University a number of years ago, and my opponent had four books on his table, and three of the four were by Bart Ehrman. And so he has confirmed many people in their unbelief. And why would any of this be relevant to you?

Because my daughter, Summer, when she went to Glendale Community College freshman year, ran into a vile anti-Christian teacher. And when I say vile, it just shows what different generation I'm from. I bought her an MP3 player to take the class when she started telling me what this guy was like.

And so I would listen to her classes the next day, normally while I was riding my bike. And I didn't know that in universities, you could be that colorful in your language, in your lectures. I mean, profanity in your lectures, but that's what you're allowed to do these days, I guess.

And the bias, the prejudice, the bigotry, and the inaccurate positions that he would take, especially in regards to the Scriptures, I could tell where they were coming from. I knew when I debated Bart, I basically read all the books he had written up to that point, and I listened to a number of his online classes.

I had spent hours and hours and hours listening to him, and I can guarantee you, he did not spend two minutes listening to me. That's been my experience with all of the people on the left. When I debated John Shelby Spong, the late John Shelby Spong, it was on, is homosexuality consistent with the Bible?

When I debated him and Barry Lynn, both of whom are now in eternity, neither one of them brought a Bible to a debate on whether homosexuality is consistent with the Bible. And neither one of them had read a single word that I had ever written or said on the subject.

And I had read their books and listened to their lectures, and so you can sort of tell where a debate's going to go when one side's prepared and the other side doesn't care what the other side has to say.

And it was very clear that Bart had not done anything. And then listening to these people, like the professor that my daughter had, I could tell what part of Ehrman's material they were trying to repeat, but they didn't even understand his position well enough to accurately repeat it.

And so your kids, your grandkids who go to universities will be hearing from professors material that's second and third hand, but most of it is originated in Ehrman and in the milieu he suggests and sort of lives in.

And that's why you need to be familiar with these things and at least know what resources are available to provide responses to those things. And so using material like Apollonius of Tiana is a really easy mechanism to try to take students that have been raised in our churches and separate them from their faith life, hope that because they're now away from home, they're in this libertine environment, that it takes just a few things like that to break the connections and start them on a completely different direction.

And it is purposeful. And he's not the only one that does it. And that's not the only story that's used to do that. But anyway, so we were supposed to be having a conversation and I've already, we're done now aren't we?

Isn't that pretty much it?

The Historical Distance and Pagan Spin Behind the Apollonius Comparison

I think that's it. Let's go through a few of the specific examples. You mentioned the fact that rather than being a contemporary of Jesus, what we have is from Philostratus, which is he's writing 200 years after Jesus.

He's writing about someone back in the late first, early second century. So more roughly contemporary with Jesus, but the sources are much later. But most people don't know their history. So they get overwhelmed.

But when you start looking at the supposed parallels, you find out the angelic visitor is actually a Roman demigod, Proteus, half man, half fish. He's portraying divine in a Roman sense when his sponsor is the wife of Septimius Severus who's trying to destroy the church.

He was also called the son of God because he was the adopted son of Marcus Aurelius, the previous Caesar.

But one of the things I want to... And all of those are very, very, very different contexts than the New Testament's understanding of Jesus. It's very, very important. People don't understand that there's so much material on YouTube, so much material in the modern context of people trying to draw these parallelomania where there's all these dying and rising gods.

No, there's not. Not in the context of monotheistic Judaism. Not in a context that would be consistent with the Old Testament. Not in a context where you have documented, proven prophetic materials that we know were written hundreds and hundreds of years before the events that take place in the first century.

And the vast majority of dying and rising gods are actually mythology related to the agricultural cycle. Because we don't understand that grocery stores are an amazing modern invention, okay? And for a very, very long time, everyone's life was regulated around the agricultural cycle.

The growing season, harvesting, almost all of the religious festivals and everything else had to do with, hey, winter's coming, and Al Gore is wrong, and it gets cold, and you've got to have food to survive, and you've got to keep your crops, your animals alive.

And so it was very, very... And so almost all this dying and rising gods stuff was about the cycle, the agricultural cycle of death in the winter and rising in the spring, and et cetera, et cetera. And that has nothing to do with the story of Christ.

It has nothing to do with monotheism, and it has nothing to do with the prophetic. It's completely different. And they simply market... They recognize that most of the people they're trying to reach don't have a critical knowledge of the differences between Judaism in the ancient world and the religions of Rome, Greece, Babylon, Assyria, whatever it might be.

There's these massive, massive differences. So it's easy to confuse people at that point.

By the way, I forgot to mention in our introduction, we'll have another speaker in October, Lord Willing, and talking about progressive Christianity. She's written several books, Lisa Childers will be talking with Dan Jensen, who's also written on progressive Christianity.

But I want to tie in the story of Apollonius to a broader subject for Ehrman. Apollonius is not killed. He dies, I believe, a natural death. He's not killed by the Romans. He does not physically rise from the dead.

But there's a dream that someone has that supposedly affirms that he is still alive, that there's an afterlife, and his spirit is still out there somewhere. Ehrman tries to tie that into Christianity because he insists that, here's a quote, the only way you can do history responsibly is on the basis of shared presuppositions.

And he explains, he says, you can't say Jesus was raised from the dead as a historical statement because it presupposes all sorts of theological beliefs that aren't shared in the historical community.

And so he says that the way Jesus became God, the way the resurrection came to be accepted was that people had dreams, and then they assumed that, like Apollonius, Jesus had actually been raised. How do you...

Right.

Ehrman simply will not even acknowledge someone as a historian unless they agree with him that history must be purely naturalistic. He said that to me, well, you're not a historian. It doesn't matter if I teach history, but you're not a historian.

And so the idea is that real history is naturalistic history. That is, it cannot allow for...it can allow for God to exist, it just cannot allow for God to be active in history. And his whole idea is, well, if God hasn't spoken, then we wouldn't know when God had interfered in history to begin with, and therefore, we simply can't allow that kind of claim to have any kind of impact in our historical conclusions.

Well, the result of that is that you are presuppositionally coming to the conclusion that whatever you say about history, you cannot say God had anything to do with it. You can say it's strange, you can say it's weird, you can say we don't know, but the one thing you can't say is that there is any kind of coherent pattern or purpose.

So fundamentally then, you know, what's behind that? Well, I would think that one of the things that's behind that for Ehrman anyways is that he well knows that the early church, as recorded in Acts and at the end of Luke, the early church had as its foundation the idea that the life, death, and ministry of Jesus Christ had been prophesied from Moses throughout all of the prophets and the Psalms, and that this was what gave him unique authority.

So I don't know if any of you saw, about three weeks ago now, my fellow pastor and I, Jeff Durbin, had a discussion on Apology Radio with Brandon Robertson. Did anybody? That's about a third, okay, very good.

Brandon Robertson is a homosexual theologian, basically, I guess is what you would call him. And when I raised the statement of the Gospel of Luke that Jesus, beginning with Moses through all of the prophets and the Psalms, demonstrated their testimony concerning Him, I said, let me take a guess, you don't think Jesus ever did that?

And he says, no, of course not, and then he went off into the Jesus Seminar. And if you don't know who the Jesus Seminar was, they're not really relevant any longer, but back in the 1980s, they were a bunch of radical, see, I would call them leftists, they would use progressive if you want to use that, but way out on the left fringe that got together and, you may have heard of this, they would present papers before their meetings and then they would take a vote of their members as to whether Jesus ever said the section they were currently studying.

And they would vote by putting marbles into a bag that was passed around the room. And the marbles would represent, yes, He said it, no, He didn't say it, He might have said something a little like that, or He probably said something like that but not exactly type of thing.

And then you'd count the marbles up and they eventually put out a very humbly titled gospel, Gospels called the Scholar's Version, and they printed the various portions of the Gospels based upon their conclusions, and of course, like in the Gospel of John, there were like two words that Jesus actually said from their perspective.

And so, this is the kind of radical skepticism. There is, I linked to it just recently. I actually had the opportunity, as a seminary student, to be on a secular radio station with the founder of the Jesus Seminar, Robert Funk.

Did you ever hear this? You did? I'm not going to ask you to exegete it or anything. This panicked look, like, I don't know, what should I say, I'm not sure. What happened was, this was a very, very long time ago.

I was challenging him. I was a student at Fuller Theological Seminary, so I already heard all the leftism I needed. And so, I was challenging a lot of things that he was saying, and he wasn't used to being challenged in that way.

And so, during one of the commercial breaks, I grew up doing radio. I started doing radio as a freshman or sophomore in high school, and I worked through college as a radio announcer, so microphones and stuff like that, no big deal for me.

So, I noticed that the host of the program, a guy named Barry, he was getting in his earphone. I could tell that Robert Funk had hung up on us, that he had left. And so, Barry Young was his name, and he says, well, call him back.

He says, but he hung up on us, call him back. And so, live on the air, the phone's, and he picks up and he says, Dr. Funk, we lost the line. No, you didn't lose the line. I hung up on you. Well, why would you do that?

He says, well, because I felt like it. And Barry says, well, my producer says you told us all to go to hell. He says, hell's a good place to go. And that's how it went. He literally told us all to go to hell and hung up on us because I was challenging him on his presuppositions.

This is what the Jesus Seminar is sort of about. The other co-founder of the Jesus Seminar was John Dominic Crossan. And I debated Dom Crossan in 2008, I think. Dom is a lovely little teeny tiny Irishman.

He's a wonderful little Irishman. And he spent the entire decade of the 60s in a monastery cell as a Roman Catholic priest studying the Gospels. And the end result was he eventually was removed from the Roman Catholic priesthood and came to the conclusion he wasn't sure there is a personal God, and he certainly doesn't believe there's an afterlife.

And he was the co-founder with Robert Funk of the Jesus Seminar. So that's how radical these folks really are. And that's where Brandon Robertson was getting his material to just dismiss the fact that you have this consistent testimony in the Gospels and just listen to the sermons of the early church.

What are they doing? They are going... If you want to know, when Jesus talked to the disciples and walked them through the prophetic testimony, read the sermons of the early church in Acts. Read Paul's arguments in his epistles, read Peter does the same thing, and you will see them very carefully utilizing the Old Testament text as a testimony to who Christ is.

And that prophetic... And remember, up until last century, the oldest manuscripts we had of the Old Testament were the Masoretic text from around 900 years after Christ. And then what do we have? What happens last century?

The Dead Sea Scrolls, Qumran. And so on. And now we have manuscripts that predate Christ, especially the Isaiah Scroll, where there are so many prophetic references to Jesus. And most of the Psalter as well is found there, predating the days of Jesus.

And so all these texts that the New Testament writers are referring to, we now can document, yes, these... They weren't just creating this stuff out of whole cloth. This stuff was written long before as we had believed, but again, progressivists will always...

I mean, it almost seems to me that one of the best things we could do in our churches, honestly, would be to have a Sunday school series of lessons, not from a pulpit, but make sure all of our people are there.

To give them an understanding of what most liberal Christians, quote-unquote Christians, think about the Bible. Because that's the majority of what the schools are teaching, including religious schools.

That's just the reality. We need to recognize that because they don't believe there was a Moses, and they think you're an idiot if you think there was a Moses. Jesus thought there was a Moses, but there's even a way around that.

You know how to get around that? Well, we don't know what Jesus actually said. That's just Matthew's perspective, which means we don't have any idea what Jesus said about anything. I don't know how you can call yourself a Christian and you don't really think that we have any idea what Jesus ever said, but this is where we are.

And so they have these positions. They can get around almost anything. But when you get to really digging into the presuppositions, the early church believed that they had divine historical prophecy that has fulfilled the person of Jesus Christ.

And the progressivist mind must do whatever it can to automatically dismiss that because no one can know the future. That's a presupposition. No one can know the future. There cannot be prophecy. So you have to deal with it in some other fashion.

And they always come up with something.

Mark Urban likes to say, I'm a historian, I don't believe in miracles. So basically, you start with that presupposition, and then you come up with any kind of naturalistic explanation. The disciples must have had dreams, it must have had a vision, they must have been smoking something, must have been some kind of naturalistic explanation because you've excluded any supernatural explanation by definition.

One of the things that that leads, you know, Urban can do real scholarship. And in the same way that he can then claim that he's a scholar and he can offer opinions on child rearing, you know, because he's a scholar.

And anything a scholar does must be scholarship. Because it's in a related field, people don't laugh at it. But then he'll take it to another level and he'll make statements like, Jesus didn't think he was God.

He says, Paul didn't think he was writing the Bible. As if he can know. Yes. I mean, it's one of these things, it's like, if you just take basic logic, how does he presume to know what Jesus thought?

Well, I can't answer how he presumes to, but one of the most glaring examples of that inconsistency, I remember before we debated, this would probably be about 2007-ish, I was riding South Mountain, which is a beautiful park down in the southern part of Phoenix.

And I was listening to an interview that Issues Etc., I don't know if you ever heard of them, it's a Lutheran program, haven't heard them for a while, I'm not sure if they're still on the air, but anyway, Issues Etc. had him on.

And it was the first time that I heard him explaining why he had rejected the inspiration of Scripture on the basis of textual variation. Think about what he said here, and then you're going to realize where the contradiction is.

He literally believes that if the Bible was inspired, God would have prohibited any scribe from ever making a mistake in the transmission of the text. And so since scribes made errors, then the Bible can't be inspired.

And I remember I was riding along, and I mean, I've dealt with Mormons and Muslims and atheists before this, and I had heard a lot of different stuff, but I expected Ehrman to have a very nuanced thought-through position.

And this is almost childish, and he still holds this position, that if God were to inspire the Bible initially, then He would basically continue the act of inspiration for every scribe thereafter. And I'm sitting here going, exactly how does that work?

Okay, I mean, think of it, you're sitting there making a copy of the Gospel of John, okay, and your mind is wandering. That's happened a few times in life, and you're about to skip a line. You're about to misspell a word.

You're about to put another word in your mind in the place of the original word or something. What's God going to do? Is He going to all of a sudden take you over and start doing automatic writing, where instead of writing what you were going to write, all of a sudden, then all of a sudden you go, ooh, where'd that come from?

Or is He just going to make the scribe spontaneously combust, you know, flames at that particular point? What's He going to do? I'm sitting here going, how does this even work? But think about it, that would require God to be very much active in history.

He'd have to be supernaturally intending everything taking place in history for Bart Ehrman to believe that inspiration had taken place in the past. But the reason He doesn't believe it took place in the past is because of what happened in history.

And it's just so obviously this vicious tight circle that this brilliant person doesn't seem to see and is unwilling, as I found out, like I said, our initial, when we contacted him and the contract he signed was going to specifically focus on that issue, can there be divine inspiration in light of textual variation?

And when he gets just a few weeks out, he's like, mm, I ain't doing that. You know, I don't know if he wanted to blame somebody else for signing the contract or whatever. He didn't want to touch that with a 10-foot pole.

Does he know that there's a contradiction there? I don't know. But he is incredibly inconsistent at this very point. And the other thing that that issue raises is Bart Ehrman is good on historical stuff.

He is not good on theology. And it is a problem in our society that if you have letters after your name, somehow that makes you an expert in everything. No it doesn't. And in fact, I'll be honest with you, the way we do education today makes it a higher probability that if you do have a highly specialized degree that you probably know less about the general field of human knowledge than a lot of people who just have a lot of life experience.

Because we have so atomized the field of scholarly study. You have to go so narrow and so deep in one area that you don't have time to learn broad spectrum fundamental truths. Someone who, for example, has a degree in computer science in the vast majority of educational systems today is not going to be required to have anything but extremely general classes in philosophy, history, all the things that would allow you to put computer science into some type of a context in the history of mankind.

And yet what we do is, oh, that's Dr. So-and-so, and therefore he must know everything about everything. That's not the way that it works, and yet we treat people that way. And the result is what we see with Bart Ehrman.

And so, he has made some, I'm not sure if you're going to get to this, but he has made some massive theological blunders. You're just going to have to wait a little while longer.

Let me touch on a couple of things here. What he's done with the story of Apollonius is dust off...

We're back to Apollonius, folks. Just to tie up loose ends.

He's dusted off third century anti-Christian propaganda. He's redefined everything, trying to make it fit a narrative that has no historical basis, but since people don't actually go back and read what Philostratus actually wrote,.

It sounds good. No one's ever heard of Philostratus.

And it sells, in terms of motivations, I don't know the man, but Bruce Metzger never made it to the New York Times bestseller list saying that we have the word of God. Bart Ehrman, on the other hand, takes the exact same evidence and says, there's three times as many textual variances in our words, we can't know anything.