Nearly half of the New Testament is a forgery, according to a world-renowned Bible scholar whose new book fingering the forgers is making evangelical Christians as mad as — well, hell.
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As an undergrad at Chicago's Moody Bible Institute in the mid-1970s, Ehrman was "an extremely zealous, rigorous, pious (self-righteous)" evangelical who followed the school's draconian rules — no smoking, drinking, card-playing, dancing, movies, or beards — because Bible verses seemed to support them. Unlike most college students, unlike nearly all young Americans, Moody students didn't question authority.
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Studying for his PhD a few years later at Princeton Theological Seminary, poring over each part of the New Testament in its original Koine Greek, the born-again young scholar remained "passionate about my studies and the truth that I could find." But what he found instead were errors. Contradictions. Self-defeating arguments. Historical inaccuracies. And worse.
"The New Testament (not to mention the Old Testament, where the problems are even more severe) was chock full of discrepancies. ... I wrestled with these problems, I prayed about them. ... Eventually I came to realize that the Bible not only contains untruths or accidental mistakes. It also contains what almost anyone today would call lies."
Lies. Not just fact-twisting fabrications but the composition of entire books by obscure authors who claimed to be the Apostles Peter and Paul and other spiritual celebrities but weren't.
http://www.alternet.org/story/150734/meet_bart_ehrman%3A_a_one-man_god_fraud_squad?akid=6906.200602.Dkhv8l&rd=1&t=2