Bart Ehrman's Farewell Speech

Kevin Harris: After more than forty years in the classroom, including thirty-seven at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Bart Ehrman is retiring from UNC. While he will still be speaking and giving interviews, Bart delivered his final public lecture at UNC on December 7, 2025. He spoke on the most significant discovery in the history of biblical studies. One can tell from listening to this final lecture what is important to him and what he really wants to communicate. I have some key excerpts from that address. But first, in your opinion, Bill, how significant is the scholarly career of Bart Ehrman? What are some of his contributions?

Dr. Craig: His contributions to establishing the Greek text of the New Testament are very important, but I think he is relatively insignificant as a historical Jesus scholar. He is a popularizer of historical Jesus studies, the best-selling religious author with Oxford University Press. It is his popular-level books that have made him famous.

Kevin Harris: Let’s go to the first clip. What is the most significant discovery in the history of biblical studies? Clip number one.

Dr. Ehrman: What do I consider to be the most significant discovery ever made in its history, in the history of the discipline? Flawed manuscripts. Whoever wrote the books of the New Testament – the various books – wrote them at some time, mainly in the first century. And you just take an example like whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew sat down at one point and wrote it out, maybe around the year 80 or 85. He wrote his gospel. He had other sources, but he wrote something down on papyrus, and that was sometime in the first century. You can call that the original thing, the thing that he wrote, and he started passing it around for people to look at.

And then, after a while, somebody wanted a copy of it, right? And so, somebody made a copy of it. And then somebody copied the copy, and then somebody copied the copy of the copy, and then somebody copied the copy of the copy of the copy. And it went on like that, it went on like that for centuries. And that thing that the person wrote doesn’t exist anymore. And that’s not unique for the New Testament. All the books of the ancient world are like that. It is just how it was.

And so, you don’t have originals. You’ve got later copies. The problem is that scribes make mistakes. Today we have more than 100 manuscripts. Today we know of over 5,800 manuscripts. How many variants do we know about? And the recent estimates are around 500,000. So most of them don’t matter, but some of them matter a lot. Some of them actually change what a verse means, or what a chapter means, or what a book means. Sometimes they change the theology of the whole thing. That really does matter. But that’s not the most significant discovery in the history of biblical scholarship.

Kevin Harris: That was just a tease. It is not the most significant discovery. What is your response to the manuscript variance, Bill?

Dr. Craig: The irony is that the very multiplicity of the variants and the abundance of manuscripts enables scholars to reconstruct the text of the original autographs with well over 97 percent accuracy. And Bart Ehrman knows this. A few years ago, I heard him interviewed on a Lutheran radio show.^[1] And the interviewer said to Dr. Ehrman, “What do you think the original text of the New Testament actually said?” And Ehrman replied, “Well, what do you mean?” The interviewer said, “There have been all these variants, all these changes that have been introduced. What did the original say?” Bart said, “It said pretty much what our Bibles today say.”

The interviewer said, “I am confused. I thought there were all these copyist errors.” Ehrman said, “Oh, well yeah, but we have been able to reconstruct the text, so that we know what the original says.” Ehrman himself knows this, but he really misleads innocent laypeople by talking about the uncertainty introduced by all of these variants.

Kevin Harris: Bart continues with the most significant discovery. Clip number two.

Dr. Ehrman: The findings of archaeology. Both Old Testament and New Testament are texts that people read, and study, and analyze. But at some point, people realized there probably should be some evidence that these things happened, like material evidence, like archaeological evidence. Well, like what? In the ancient history of Israel, we have the account in the Old Testament, the book of Exodus, of the children of Israel becoming enslaved by the Egyptians for centuries and growing to be a great people. And then God raises up Moses to bring them out of their slavery in Egypt.

And we are told there were 600,000 of these Israelites who were military-age men. So it’s not counting women, not counting children, not counting the elderly. So we are talking about two and a half or three million people. So with big events like this, you kind of think there might be some archaeological evidence that they happened. These accounts are not historical as described in the Bible. They are probably not historical as described in the Bible. But this too is not the most significant discovery of biblical studies.

Kevin Harris: Again, Bart is teasing. How do you respond to the lack of what should be a vast wealth of archaeological evidence, according to Bart?

Dr. Craig: I have heard it said by professional archaeologists that well over 90 percent of the sites remain unexcavated, and over 90 percent of what has been excavated remains unanalyzed. So there’s a lot yet to discover. I am not an Old Testament scholar and can’t speak to the question of the Exodus. You need to look at an Old Testament scholar like Kenneth Kitchen who wrote a book entitled The Reliability of the Old Testament if you are interested in this subject.

But what is amazing to me is that we have so many archaeological remains from New Testament times that confirm the reliability of the Gospels. For example, I am absolutely astonished that we should have the ossuaries, or the bone boxes, of the high priest Caiaphas and apparently of James, the brother of Jesus. Certainly, the most important archaeological find of all is the tomb of Jesus that lies beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The claim of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to be located on the site of Jesus’ tomb, which has been excavated, is very strong. So, incredibly, we have this archaeological remain of the very tomb in which Jesus’ body was laid after his crucifixion.

Kevin Harris: I have read that there is a lot of work being done on the Exodus. Most of us know that absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. Is it the contention of historians that absence of evidence is significant when we should expect there to be evidence? If an elephant were in your living room for one week, you should expect some evidence of that.

Dr. Craig: Yes. As I explained a moment ago, it is very difficult to identify successfully what archaeological remains ought to be discovered. Arguments from silence are not very powerful. It would have to be highly probable that there would be remains and then, secondly, highly probable that, if there were remains, then they would have been excavated and discovered by us. Therefore, as you say, arguments based on the absence of evidence are very tenuous and uncertain.

Kevin Harris: Bart continues his speech in this next clip. What is the most significant discovery in biblical studies? Clip number three.

Dr. Ehrman: The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls? We have for long had very limited knowledge about Judaism in the days of Jesus. It is strange how little evidence we’ve had because most of our Jewish evidence about the ancient world comes [to] us from Jewish writings that were produced hundreds of years later, the Mishnah, the Talmud. And, you know, people had some ideas. Of course we have Jewish sources from the time of Jesus, especially the Jewish historian Josephus and other things, but we had fairly limited knowledge.

But then a significant discovery – a hugely significant discovery – was made in 1947. In 1947 the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Some of them were fairly complete scrolls. The Isaiah scroll is magnificent. It’s a copy of Isaiah that is a thousand years earlier than the copy we were relying on up until then. They vastly improved our understanding of first-century Judaism because of the kinds of things they were. We have a description of a war that was soon going to take place. It was going to be the war to end all wars. The apocalyptic end of time was going to come, and we have a scroll that describes it. These scrolls are just absolutely fantastic for enlightening us about one aspect of Judaism that we had very little knowledge of before.

And so hugely important, but also for the relevance for understanding Jesus because these scrolls embody a worldview about the coming judgment of God against this world that is going to happen very soon to destroy all those who are opposed to God, and bring in a good world that God had planned from the beginning. It is very much like the teachings of Jesus at the same time in roughly the same area. It is not that Jesus belonged to this community, but it set the context within which to put Jesus’ proclamation. Hugely significant, but not the most significant discovery.

Kevin Harris: Another tease. A final tease I will say. He suspects that Jesus was caught up in the apocalyptic fever of the Essenes or the surrounding culture of the time. Bill, is that what he is saying?

Dr. Craig: I think it is right that Jesus did believe that his coming represented the advent of God’s reign on Earth, but there is no reason to connect this with the community of the Essenes living in the Dead Sea area. As an aside, this Isaiah scroll is very significant with respect to Bart’s earlier point about the manuscript variance and the copyist errors. This Isaiah scroll, as he said, dates from one thousand years earlier than the medieval manuscripts of Isaiah that we had. Yet, when you compare the two over that thousand year time, virtually no copyist errors were introduced. These Jewish scribes were so careful that the medieval Isaiah scrolls are virtually identical to this ancient Isaiah scroll.

Kevin Harris: No joking now. Bart declares the greatest discovery in biblical studies. Clip number four.

Dr. Ehrman: The single most [significant] discovery, I’m now going to tell you – it is that the Bible is not a single book. Let me explain why this rather banal observation has made such a huge impact. The reality of the canon. You’ve got 66 of these books, but people treat them as a book because they are between two covers. When you read a book, you expect it to be consistent. It doesn’t occur to you that the author is going to flat out contradict himself on the next page. You don’t expect it.

I simply have my students do a very basic exercise that I recommend you all do. Just read Genesis 1 and list everything that happens in order. Then read Genesis 2, which is also part of the creation, and list everything that happens in order. Just do it. Compare your lists. OK. Good luck. If you compare what Acts says about Paul with what Paul says about Paul, Paul actually tells us what happens in Galatians chapter 1. And what he explicitly says is – you can look this up – He says: “I did not consult with flesh and blood. I did not talk to anybody about it. And I did not go confer with the apostles in Jerusalem.” And Paul is trying to say, “No, I didn’t even talk to them. It was three years before I went to talk with them,” he says. In Acts what happens? He makes a beeline to Jerusalem to talk to them.

Kevin Harris: OK. So, the Bible is not just one book. I did not see that coming. You may have some thoughts on the significance of that, and maybe on the two examples of discrepancy he cites, like the creation accounts and what Acts says about Paul’s conversion and Paul’s account of his conversion.

Dr. Craig: It’s certainly true that the Bible is not just one book. It’s a collection of diverse sorts of literature by different authors who have different perspectives on things. Just to give one example: isn’t it interesting that the Gospel of John has no account of the baptism of Jesus or of Jesus’ institution of the Last Supper? Now these were doubtlessly historical events which are related in the Synoptic Gospels. And so we wonder, why did John choose to omit these pivotal events in the life of Jesus? We don’t know. We can only speculate.

But as for the examples that Bart gives, I don’t think that there are any significant inconsistencies in the accounts of the creation of the world in Genesis 1 and the account of the creation of mankind in Genesis 2. The only inconsistencies concern whether or not man is created before or after the vegetation and the animals. And in these two different stories, the order in which these are created is different. It’s hardly something that is significant and undermines the central teaching of the doctrine of creation.

Now, as for Paul and Acts, I don’t know what version of the book of Acts Bart is reading, because in my Bible it certainly does not say that he made a beeline for Jerusalem. Here’s what Acts 9 says. “But Saul increased all the more in strength and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ. When many days had passed, the Jews plotted to kill him. But their plot became known to Saul. They were watching the gates day and night to kill him. But his disciples took him by night and let him down over the wall, lowering him in a basket. And when he had come to Jerusalem, he attempted to join the disciples,” etc, etc.

There is no inconsistency there between what Paul says and what Luke, who was after all a traveling companion of Paul, says concerning Paul’s activities after his conversion on the road to Damascus.

Kevin Harris: So how does he end his final lecture? Here it is, clip number five.

Dr. Ehrman: One of the reasons I valued and continue to value teaching biblical studies in the modern university is because it’s a way of getting people to think about how you construct arguments and what you consider to be evidence. This is very important in all the fields of the humanities: English, history, philosophy, classics. List your field. These fields are important for giving us information and for learning substance, learning data, but they’re especially important because they teach you how to think.

And if you don’t think, well, okay, they still let you vote.

The humanities are vital to this country. And at the time when we need people to be able to see the difference between truth and falsity, when we know what is right and what is wrong, when we know whether an argument is any good, when we look to see if the evidence is actually there, those are the things taught in the humanities. And it’s precisely at the moment that we are cutting humanities in our universities.

This is the worst time in the history of the planet to be cutting the humanities. These students are going to be voting. And among the humanities, religious studies more than any other in the South, because of this thing this drives people to think, because the kinds of things I’ve been talking to you run contrary to what they’ve always thought. They’re going to fight against it, and they’re going to find evidence for their view, or they’re going to finally succumb to what I am telling you is the truth.

Kevin Harris: Well, it’s rather political, but also a good plug for the humanities and using our brains. He makes a couple of digs at the South throughout this speech. We’re considering a podcast on Bart’s recent debate with Mike Licona on New Testament authorship. I haven’t heard the entire debate yet, but we’ll check it out. But sum up your thoughts on Bart’s bye-bye bash, Bill.

Dr. Craig: Well, certainly I second and endorse his advocacy of the humanities and the importance of critical thinking skills. But honestly, I find it so ironic that it would be Bart Ehrman of all people saying that it teaches us how to construct arguments and evaluate evidence, because this is one of his great weaknesses.

Look at his debate with me at the College of the Holy Cross on the resurrection of Jesus. He simply trots out the fallacious argument of David Hume against miracles. And when I expose the error in this, he doesn’t even understand it. He thinks I’m trying to use mathematics to prove the existence of God, when in fact I’m exposing the demonstrative logical fallacy of his argument against miracles.

So while the humanities are important in teaching us to evaluate arguments and assess evidence, I fear that that is a skill that Bart has not yet mastered.^[2]