Bart Ehrman is one of today’s most recognizable critics of traditional Christianity. He’s sharp, accessible, and has done more than almost anyone to bring New Testament scholarship into public conversation. His journey from fundamentalist Christian to "agnostic atheist" is honest and compelling. But there’s an issue at the heart of his approach: almost everything rests on what can be proven, historically verified, or reconstructed from ancient texts. And that leaves out an entire dimension of how many people actually come to believe.
The Limits of “Show Me the Evidence”
Ehrman often points to suffering in the world as a major obstacle to faith. He also spends considerable time on the complexities of biblical manuscripts — contradictions, copy errors, and the long history of textual transmission. These are real concerns, and he handles them well. But all of them depend on a particular way of knowing: reasoning from documents, analyzing evidence, and drawing conclusions the way a historian would.
The pattern is clear. If something can’t be demonstrated like a lab result or footnoted like an academic source, it gets set aside as irrelevant to the question of faith. That commitment to historical method is admirable — but also strangely narrow.
There’s Another Kind of Knowing
Most people don’t come to belief because they’ve solved the problem of suffering or mastered textual criticism. They believe because of lived experience — the kind of interior moments that don’t show up in manuscripts but shape a person’s life.
It might be a sudden, unexpected sense of peace during a crisis. Or a feeling of presence that arrives unbidden. Or a moment of insight that seems given rather than constructed. Some speak of being guided, nudged, or called in ways they can’t easily explain. These moments aren’t “proofs” in the scholarly sense, but they are a kind of knowing — intuitive, experiential, and often transformative.
Call it grace, spiritual perception, intuition, the “still small voice,” or simply experience. Whatever the name, it has guided human beings long before footnotes existed.
Ehrman Talks About Texts. Most Believers Talk About Encounters.
Ehrman is brilliant at analyzing manuscripts and evaluating historical claims. What he spends far less time addressing is the inner life — the dimension where many people actually experience the presence of God. And if God exists at all, isn’t it reasonable to think divine reality would be encountered in consciousness, not just in the margins of ancient papyri?
This isn’t about rejecting reason. It’s about recognizing that spiritual experience adds a dimension that historical method simply can’t access.
A Two-Dimensional Approach to a Three-Dimensional Reality
Ehrman approaches faith through questions that historians are trained to ask: What do we know for sure? What can be verified? Where does the evidence point? These are important and necessary. But when they become the only criteria for truth, the picture becomes flat.
It’s like trying to understand music by studying sheet music but never listening to the performance. Or trying to understand love by reading relationship data instead of experiencing it. The analysis matters — but so does the encounter.
A More Modest Take
This doesn’t mean Ehrman is wrong. It simply means he may be using tools that are powerful for some questions and powerless for others. Historical research can reveal a great deal about the past, but it can’t fully account for the inner dimension where people often meet the sacred.
Some truths aren’t found in manuscripts. They’re found in moments — in peace, in clarity, in guidance, in interior experience. And that kind of knowing can be a “reason to believe” in its own right.
Something to Ponder
Do you think spiritual experience can count as a valid form of knowledge — or must everything be historically verified to have meaning?
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