I feel great pity for Bart Ehrman. It appears that the kind of fundamentalism in which the Christian believer turned biblical debunker was raised did not prepare him for the challenges he would face in college. He was taught, rightly, that there are no contradictions in the Bible, but he was trained, quite falsely, to interpret the non-contradictory nature of the Bible in modern, scientific, post-Enlightenment terms. That is to say, he was encouraged to test the truth of the Bible against a verification system that has only existed for some 250 years.
Craig Blomberg, professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary, has devoted much of his scholarly life to assuring evangelical students raised in fundamentalist homes that the authority—and inerrancy—of the Bible does not depend on its living up to logical positivist standards that would have meant nothing to Moses, David, Luke, or Paul. In Can We Still Believe the Bible?: An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions, he does his fellow evangelicals a vital service by identifying and discussing six areas where critics like Ehrman have sown deep seeds of doubt in the minds of believers and seekers as to the reliability of the Bible.
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