Bart Ehrman is a first-rate scholar but he misses the point and it seems he should know better.

At Princeton Theological Seminary, he was the student of Bruce Metzger (1914-2007), one of the highest regarded scholars of Greek, New Testament, and New Testament Textual Criticism in the world. In fact, Erhman dedicates Misquoting Jesus to Metzger and even helped update the fourth edition of Metzger’s classic The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. Unlike Metzer, N.T. Wright, and others, however, his scholarship has become a clarion call to lead people away from the Christian faith.

It’s interesting that the “copies of copies of copies” argument that led Ehrman away from evangelicalism is the very thing that has drawn others, including myself, toward it. Consider the two statements below, the second of which is co-written by Ehrman himself!:

“Fortunately, if the great number of MSS [manuscripts] increases the number of scribal errors, it increases proportionately the means of correcting such errors, so that the margin of doubt left in the process of recovering the exact original wording is not so large as might be feared; it is in truth remarkably small. The variant readings about which any doubt remains among textual critics of the New Testament affect no material question of historic fact or of Christian faith and practice.”

F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents; Are They Reliable?, 14-15. Bruce (1910-1990) was Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester, England.

“But the amount of evidence for the text of the New Testament, whether derived from manuscripts, early versions, or patristic quotations is so much greater than that available for any ancient classical author that the necessity of resorting to emendation is reduced to the smallest dimensions.”

Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, Fourth Edition, 230.

Like Ehrman, I’ve always preferred to live life with my brain engaged. I’ve seen too many ridiculous and painful things that result from blind faith in a book or authority figure. That’s why, as I’ve grown in faith, I’ve been grateful to learn that Jesus taught his followers to love God with their minds (Matt. 22:37). At the same time, it’s both striking and instructive that though some of Jesus’ first-followers were top scholars, many were illiterate fisherman. And this is good news because it means that getting and embracing God’s love in Christ doesn’t—thank God—require a certain IQ.

Ehrman, with all his vast learning, is a reminder to all that our lives can be instruments that lead others toward God or away from him. What’s more, even great intellects with amazing capacity for detail can still miss the forest—and its Maker—for the trees. The Apostle Paul, one of the greatest minds of the first century, said it well:

Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb—preaching, of all things!—to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation.

While Jews clamor for miraculous demonstrations and Greeks go in for philosophical wisdom, we go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle—and Greeks pass it off as absurd. But to us who are personally called by God himself—both Jews and Greeks—Christ is God’s ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one. Human wisdom is so tiny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can’t begin to compete with God’s ‘weakness.’

Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of ‘the brightest and the best’ among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these ‘nobodies’ to expose the hollow pretensions of the ‘somebodies’? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, “If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.”

1 Corinthians 1: 21-31, The Message