Bart Ehrman looks back on his undergraduate days at Moody Bible Institute.
I did not start learning how to think until I left Moody, and then it took me much longer to learn how to think than normal intelligent human beings take, since I had to drop so much baggage that I had been burdened with. And this was emotionally difficult, because Moody not only loaded me up with baggage, but the people loading the baggage insisted that the only way to have a happy life and blessed afterlife was to carry that baggage all the way to the end of the road.
I don’t feel I started to become fully human until I realized that they were completely wrong, and that their approach to education was, in fact, sinister.
I operated a used book store directly across the street from Southeastern Seminary for 2-years, and have a fairly complete set of the textbooks then in use. The writing is uneven — high school-ish to college — but you will find in them the basic facts of modern Biblical scholarship: that roughly half of Paul’s epistles are forgeries, that nobody knows who wrote a single one of the four canonical gospels, or anything about Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John; that there was no Egyptian captivity; that few scholars believe that either Abraham or Moses were real people — and so on. But those facts, so devastating to the Christian narrative, are simply glossed over with blithe citations of Biblical verses which claim that the Bible is true — though there was no such thing as the Bible, or a Christian, at the time those verses were written.
It is my encounter with Biblical scholarship, and the grotesque intellectual dishonesty of seminary-educated pastors, at the very moment the Evangelical Right was beginning to make itself so troublesome, that spurred both my interest and alarm. So, congratulations to Ehrman for his successful escape.
