First, allow me to congratulate you on providing the public with an excellent array of teaching videos by the nation’s top scholars in their field. But as I was paging through the offerings on your website, I found—much to my amazement—that you’ve selected a certain Bart Ehrman as your teacher of the New Testament.

“What’s wrong with that?” you will ask.

How to put it? What illuminating example can I give to make the problem startlingly clear?  Aha! How about the following?

Imagine if I went into a shop clearly marked “Meats and Sweets by Bob the Butcher and Candymaker” for a pound of ham, a half pound of pepperoni, and a small box of chocolates. I go up to the glass counter in the front and hand Bob my shopping list.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “we’ve got no ham or pepperoni here—or chocolates for that matter. How about some nice tofu briquettes and a lentil cake?”

“Uh…what about your sign, Meats and Sweets?”

“Yes, actually, as it turns out, I’ve been a vegetarian now for thirty years. And as for the candy, I’ve sworn off that as well. It’s been a bit over ten years now for that. So, we don’t actually sell either meats or sweets.”

“But the sign!?”

“Oh that! Well, we get more business that way.”

You see the point?  Those who peruse your catalogue and come to the “sign” that reads “New Testament” would assume that the teacher was a top scholar who believed in the veracity of the subject matter. But as I hope you are aware, Bart Ehrman has developed a mini-industry in spreading doubt about the New Testament.

“But he’s a top scholar,” you may reply.

“True enough. But two points about that. First, Ehrman is one of the top scholars of a certain kind, the kind that makes his career in debunking the subject matter which he purports to teach. He’s like any of a number of such “top scholars” who chisel away at their own discipline from within. Philosophy professors who believe that there’s no truth. Literature professors who believe all literature is a sham disguise for oppressive political propaganda.  But like Bart Ehrman, they are only the top of a particular heap.  There are other top scholars, with equally powerful credentials, who disagree heartily with the likes of Ehrman.

And so it comes to this.  Either the Teaching Company should change its “sign” outside of Bart’s shop so that it accurately reflects what is sold within, or you should tap any of a number of the many top biblical scholars who actually believe the subject matter they are teaching.

How about any of the following?

Dr. Craig Evans who has a new book out entitled Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels.

Or Dr. Richard Bauckham, who has just written Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony.

Or Dr. Ben Witherington III, whose latest book is What Have They Done with Jesus?: Beyond Strange Theories and Bad History--Why We Can Trust the Bible.

Or Bishop of Durham N.T. Wright, who has just published Simply Christian.

Sincerely,
Benjamin Wiker, Ph.D.

Author Anne Rice notes hostility toward Jesus among skeptical New Testament scholars

Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts.

I'd never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling.

The people who go into Elizabethan studies don't set out to prove that Queen Elizabeth I was a fool. They don't personally dislike her. They don't make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation. They approach her in other ways. They don't even apply this sort of dislike or suspicion or contempt to other Elizabethan figures. If they do, the person is usually not the focus of the study. Occasionally a scholar studies a villain, yes. But even then, the author generally ends up arguing for the good points of a villain or for his or her place in history, or for some mitigating circumstance, that redeems the study itself. People studying disasters in history may be highly critical of the rulers of the milieu at the time, yes. But in general scholars don't spend their lives in the company of historical figures whom they openly despise.

But there are New Testament scholars who detest and despise Jesus Christ. Of course, we all benefit from freedom in the academic community; we benefit from the enormous size of biblical studies today and the great range of contributions that are being made. I'm not arguing for censorship. But maybe I'm arguing for sensitivity—on the part of those who read these books. Maybe I'm arguing for a little wariness when it comes to the field in general. What looks like solid ground might not be solid ground at all.

Anne Rice

The Peculiar Scientist

In this era of explicit faith bashing by public intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins, renowned scientist Francis Collins stands out as a curiosity for his unabashed embrace of the Christian faith. Last month, National Geographic interviewed Collins to find out more about his claim that science and faith are anything but irreconcilable.

"Into this breach steps Francis Collins, who offers himself as proof that science and religion can be reconciled. As leader of the Human Genome Project, Collins is among the world's most important scientists, the head of a multibillion- dollar research program aimed at understanding human nature and healing our innate disorders. And yet in his best-selling book, The Language of God, he recounts how he accepted Christ as his savior in 1978 and has been a devout Christian ever since. 'The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome,' he writes. 'He can be worshiped in the cathedral or in the laboratory.'"

National Geographic

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