Who Needs The Unholy Truth When You Have Bart D Ehrman?

He’s the best popularizer the field has produced, and you still can’t tell from the page where the consensus ends and where Bart begins.

Aug 28, 2026

A reader told me this week that I shouldn't have to dumb anything down, and that Bart Ehrman, the New Testament scholar with the enormous readership, is the model to follow. He wasn't accusing me of doing it, just warning me off a road he feared I could take in the name of being accessible.

The comment left me with a question he never asked. Ehrman holds a chair at the University of North Carolina and has written thirty books, and most of what I cover here sits somewhere inside them, covered well. So what's the argument for reading me at all?

The honest answer starts with what he's allowed to do that I work hard not to.

What The Guild Vets vs. What a Trade House Vets

Ehrman writes two kinds of books, and they go through two completely different filters before they reach you.

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture came out from Oxford University Press in 1993, and Forgery and Counterforgery came from Oxford in 2013. Those went to specialists who could check the Greek, the manuscript sigla, and the argument. When a book like that survives, the field has signed off on the method even where colleagues still fight about the conclusions.

Misquoting Jesus and Forged went to HarperOne. A trade house gives you an acquisitions editor, a copy editor, a publicist, and a sales target. Nobody in that building can tell you whether a claim about second-century scribal habits holds up, and nobody in that building is paid to try.

Both kinds of book have the same name on the cover and the same confident voice inside. Forged and Forgery and Counterforgery even cover the same subject, one for you and one for the guild. So when you finish a chapter of the popular version, you have no way of knowing which sentences represent settled ground that four hundred specialists would nod along to, and which represent one very well read man’s best reconstruction. He hasn’t lied to you about anything. He’s told you what he concluded, and something doesn’t become established because one influential person concluded it.

This applies to every scholar who writes directly for the public. Ehrman happens to be the most visible, so he’s the useful example.

Two Places Where Ehrman Is Making His Own Case

Take the burial of Jesus as an example, where Ehrman has argued at length, in print and in his debate with Craig Evans, that Romans normally left crucified bodies on the cross or dumped them, that Pilate had no reason to accommodate Jewish burial customs for an executed insurrectionist, and that the Joseph of Arimathea story is therefore later Christian storytelling. It’s a serious argument built on Roman practice and on what the sources don’t say. It’s also a position with substantial opposition from historians who aren’t apologists, who point to Philo, to Josephus on Jewish burial before sunset, and to the Yehohanan ossuary from Givat HaMivtar, the one crucified man we’ve dug up with his heel bone still pierced. A reader who takes the popular version at face value walks away believing the mass grave is what historians think, when historians are split.

How Jesus Became God, from 2014, traces a development from an exaltation view of Jesus, glorified at the resurrection, toward the incarnation views of the later gospels. Within months, five scholars published How God Became Jesus, a full book-length response arguing that high Christology shows up too early and too widely for that sequence to work. Michael Bird, Craig Evans, Simon Gathercole, Charles Hill, and Chris Tilling are the sort of people who write footnotes for a living, and their disagreement with Ehrman is technical rather than devotional. You wouldn’t learn any of that from reading Ehrman’s book, because a trade book has no mechanism for telling you the shape of the disagreement it’s entering.

I don’t have that latitude and I don’t want it. My job is to report where the field sits, say so plainly when the field is divided, and keep my own reconstructions out of the copy. If Ehrman claims something and a good chunk of qualified scholars disagree, I can’t hand it to you as fact, whatever it would do for the piece.

Arabic Names, Greek Terms, And The Costume Of Expertise

The Zweiquellentheorie, which remains the dominant paradigm in synoptic source criticism, posits Markan priority in conjunction with a hypothesized sayings collection designated Q, the two together accounting for the double tradition; the residual Sondergut peculiar to each evangelist is then attributed to independent redactional activity, while the minor agreements against Mark, adduced by proponents of the Farrer-Goulder hypothesis as evidence of Lukan dependence on Matthew, are explained by two-source advocates through coincidental redaction, scribal assimilation in the manuscript tradition, or a postulated Deutero-Markan recension.

What it says at its core: The Two‑Source Theory holds that Matthew and Luke both copied Mark and that they also used a hypothetical collection of Jesus’s sayings, called the Q source. The alternative hypothesis is that there has never been a shared unknown source, and that the overlap, such as changing Mark in the same way at the same spot, may be due to Luke copying Matthew, to scribes unintentionally harmonizing the texts during duplication, or simply to coincidence.

I could load the Unholy Truth pieces with expensive vocabulary, which a younger me might have done. Redaction criticism, ipsissima verba, Deutero-Isaiah, pseudepigraphon, the whole set. It reads as more authoritative and it costs me nothing to type. I leave it out on purpose. When I write about Islam, I avoid terminology with Arabic roots wherever an English phrase does the same work, and I skip naming people when the name carries no weight in the argument, because six unfamiliar Arabic names in one paragraph will lose a reader who was following the reasoning fine.

Would that run the risk of dumbing down things? My description is that I’m carrying over what specialists already know in a form somebody can follow with little effort. The information is the same information, and what’s missing is the outer garment, which is fine since I'm not writing a textbook to prepare you to sit an entrance exam in theology.

Ehrman can’t afford to do any of this to the extent I can (or people like me), because he’s a scholar, and accessibility has a ceiling for someone in his position; beyond that point, it simply wouldn’t satisfy the expectations of his job description.

Selling Conclusions To Readers Who Can’t (or Won’t) Check Them

Which brings me to the part I find harder to resolve, and I’d like to hear what you think about it.

Inside the guild, this problem doesn’t come up. A scholar can state a conclusion with total confidence because the people reading it are equipped to take it apart, and nobody in that academic circle accepts a claim on the strength of the name attached to it. Confidence is cheap when your readers can check you.

So, is it defensible for scholars to write directly to the public, present positions the field hasn’t settled in the same register they use for positions it has, and do it knowing the audience has no way to evaluate the difference? These readers can’t read the manuscripts, don’t know which journals count, and have never seen how brutal specialists are with each other in review. When it comes to religion, most people’s working definition of truth is whatever sounds most plausible and fits what they already believe, which makes a confident sentence from a credentialed author close to unfalsifiable in practice.

The incentives push one direction, because publishers buy theses rather than surveys. “Here’s a thing you were never told, and here’s what I think happened” sells; “here’s the current distribution of expert opinion, with the unresolved bits marked” doesn’t. Every popularizer in every field feels that pull, and religion is worse because the stakes feel eternal to a decent share of the audience.

None of this is about Ehrman in particular, and none of it puts me anywhere near his league. Charles Darwin ran into the same trouble in 1871 with The Descent of Man, where he moved from natural selection, which he’d built a mountain of evidence for, into ranking human races and predicting that the “civilized races” would exterminate the “savage” ones. His readers had no way to separate the part carrying the evidence from the part carrying his Victorian assumptions, and anyone looking for scientific cover for racial hierarchy has been quoting the second part ever since.

Or take Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who taught two generations how genes work. When you read him, can you tell which pages carry settled biology, which carry a formulation that plenty of working biologists dispute, and which carry ideas like memes that never took hold in the field at all? All three arrive in the same voice.

So read Ehrman, because he’s excellent, which is his own field’s assessment of him and not a compliment I’m in a position to hand out. I’ve used his work as a source here and I’ll keep using it, in the places where the field stands behind him. Read him knowing that a claim can be Ehrman’s rather than the field’s, and that the difference matters most when the claim is big.

That’s also why I don’t scatter scholars’ names through a piece to borrow their authority. One scholar’s claim is one person’s opinion, whether the name on it is Ehrman, Darwin, or Dawkins, and what turns an opinion into something you can treat as fact is what the rest of the field does with it afterward. If a name on its own settled anything, I could hand you a “well-supported” case that evolution is rubbish and creationism is the way to go, built entirely out of people with doctorates who say exactly that. Every citation would check out, but the whole thing would be as factual as your favorite bedtime story.

So what’s the argument for reading me when you have Ehrman? We’re doing two different jobs, and only one of us has the latitude to publish his own conclusions. Ehrman is working hard at being the best biblical scholar he can be, and I’m working hard at not becoming an armchair one.

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